Braun Corporation’s home-grown documentation processes served the organization well for its first 50 years as it grew from a local to a nationally-competitive producer of mobility and accessibility products. Now poised to become a global leader in its field, this corporation found its efforts hampered by ineffective and outdated documentation practices, which were hurting the company’s competitive advantage. This article describes Braun Corporation’s curious mixture of global reach and local isolation. By bringing in a technical communicator with expertise in user-centered design, Braun has begun reforming its formerly exhaustive documentation and communication practices.

While technical communicators have incorporated a variety of strategies to develop user-centered and task-based documentation, less attention has been placed on changing the cultures of these organizations. The case presented here represents a shift from establishing documentation procedures to critically assessing and reforming existing procedures for the global workplace, describing the shift from ineffective and exhaustive processes to effective processes with defined goals and measurable outcomes. The article concludes with an inventory for determining whether other organizations are over-documenting processes and products, and offers suggestions for creating better documentation procedures.

This article focuses on information architecture as a site for developing critical practice for technical communication. Such a focus suggests methods for rhetorical intervention aimed at democratizing the process of technocultural development. As a site of intervention, information architecture invites practitioners and academics to develop plans for action based on the analysis generated in descriptive research, completing the circuit from analysis to informed action.

The paper gives the first detailed complexity analysis of SQUFOF, an integer factoring algorithm invented by Daniel Shanks in the 1970s.

Let $r_s(n)$ denote the number of ways to write $n$ as the sum of $s$ squares of integers. The paper determines $r_s(n)$ modulo $2s$ when $s$ is prime or a power of 2.  For general $s$ it gives a congruence for $r_s(n)$ modulo the highest power of 2 dividing $2s$.

Algorithms for choosing random large primes generally choose primes with certain properties, such as having few bits in their binary representation. The paper uses theorems about the distribution of prime numbers to study whether there are enough primes with these properties so that they cannot be guessed by an attacker.

The paper gives a new verifiable partial key escrow scheme based on McCurley’s encryption scheme.

Virtual coordinate systems provide an accurate and efficient service that allows hosts on the Internet to determine the latency to arbitrary hosts without actively monitoring all nodes in the network. Many of the proposed virtual coordinate systems were designed with the assumption that all of the nodes in the system are altruistic. However, this assumption may be violated by compromised nodes acting maliciously to degrade the accuracy of the coordinate system. As numerous peer-to-peer applications rely on virtual coordinate systems to achieve good performance, it is critical to address the security of such systems.

In this work, we demonstrate the vulnerability of decentralized virtual coordinate systems to insider (or Byzantine) attacks. We propose techniques to make the coordinate assignment robust to malicious attackers without increasing the communication cost. We demonstrate the attacks and mitigation techniques in the context of a well-known distributed virtual coordinate system using simulations based on three representative, real-life Internet topologies of hosts and corresponding round trip times (RTT).

Many multicast overlay networks maintain application-specific performance goals by dynamically adapting the overlay structure when the monitored performance becomes inadequate. This adaptation results in an unstructured overlay where no neighbor selection constraints are imposed. Although such networks provide resilience to benign failures, they are susceptible to attacks conducted by adversaries that compromise overlay nodes. Previous defense solutions proposed to address attacks against overlay networks rely on strong organizational constraints and are not effective for unstructured overlays. In this work, we identify, demonstrate and mitigate insider attacks against measurement-based adaptation mechanisms in unstructured multicast overlay networks. We propose techniques to decrease the number of incorrect adaptations by using outlier detection and limit the impact of malicious nodes by aggregating local information to derive global reputation for each node. We demonstrate the attacks and mitigation techniques through real-life deployments of a mature overlay multicast system.

Reputation systems provide mechanisms through which multiple parties can quantify the trust between one another. These systems seek to generate an accurate assessment in the face of unprecedented community size, while providing anonymity and resilience to malicious attacks.

We focus on attacks and defense mechanisms in reputation systems. We present an analysis framework that allows for general decomposition of existing reputation systems. We classify attacks against reputation systems by identifying which system components and design choices are the target of attacks. We survey defense mechanisms employed by existing reputation systems. Finally, we analyze several landmark systems, characterizing their individual strengths and weaknesses. Our work contributes to understanding 1) which design components of reputation systems are most vulnerable, 2) what are the most appropriate defense mechanisms and 3) how these defense mechanisms can be integrated into existing or future reputation systems to make them resilient to attacks.

Many multicast overlay networks maintain application-specific performance goals such as bandwidth, latency, jitter and loss rate by dynamically changing the overlay structure using measurement-based adaptation mechanisms. This results in an unstructured overlay where no neighbor selection constraints are imposed. Although such networks provide resilience to benign failures, they are susceptible to attacks conducted by adversaries that compromise overlay nodes. Previous defense solutions proposed to address attacks against overlay networks rely on strong organizational constraints and are not effective for unstructured overlays. In this work, we identify, demonstrate and mitigate insider attacks against measurement-based adaptation mechanisms in unstructured multicast overlay networks. The attacks target the overlay network construction, maintenance, and availability and allow malicious nodes to control significant traffic in the network, facilitating selective forwarding, traffic analysis, and overlay partitioning. We propose techniques to decrease the number of incorrect or unnecessary adaptations by using outlier detection. We demonstrate the attacks and mitigation techniques in the context of a mature, operationally deployed overlay multicast system, ESM, through real-life deployments and emulations conducted on the PlanetLab and DETER testbeds, respectively.

We explore the problem of portable and flexible privacy preserving access rights that permit access to a large collection of digital goods.  Privacy-preserving access control means that the service provider can neither learn what access rights a customer has nor link a request to access an item to a particular customer, thus maintaining privacy of both customer activity and customer access rights. Flexible access rights allow a customer to choose a subset of items or groups of items from the repository, obtain access to and be charged only for the items selected. And portability of access rights means that the rights themselves can be stored on small devices of limited storage space and computational capabilities such as smartcards or sensors, and therefore the rights must be enforced using the limited re-  sources available.  In this paper, we present and compare two schemes that address the problem of such access rights. We show that much can be achieved if one allows for even a negligible amount of false positives

This paper studies a discrepancy-sensitive approach to dynamic fractional cascading. We provide an efficient data structure for dominated maxima searching in a dynamic set of points in the plane,  which in turn leads to an efficient dynamic data structure that can answer queries for nearest neighbors using any Minkowski metric.

In this work, we collect and analyze all of the IP and TCP headers of packets seen on a network that either violate existing standards or should not appear in modern internets. Our goal is to determine the reason that these packets appear on the network and evaluate what proportion of such packets could cause actual damage. Thus, we examine and divide the unusual packets obtained during our experiments into several categories based on their type and possible cause and show the results.

With the growing threat of abuse of network resources, it becomes increasingly important to be able to detect malformed packets on a network and estimate the damage they can cause. Carefully constructed, certain types of packets can cause a victim host to crash while other packets may be sent only to gather necessary information about hosts and networks can be viewed as a prelude to attack. In this paper, we collect and analyze all of the IP and TCP packets seen on a network that either violate existing standards or should not appear in modern internets. Our goal is to determine what these suspicious packets mean and evaluate what proportion of such packets can cause actual damage. Thus, we divide unusual packets obtained during our experiments into several categories depending on the severity of their consequences, including indirect consequences as a result of information gathering, and show the result. The traces analyzed were gathered at Ohio University’s main Internet link, providing a massive amount of statistical data.

With the tremendous growth of Internet resources, we observe a rapid increase in the number of network applications and protocol implementations, which are not always thoroughly evaluated and tasted. A growing number of network attacks attempt to disrupt legitimate communication or deny access to network resources to legitimate users. both poor implementations and intentional abuse of network resources “pollute” a network with malformed packets and can become a threat to sound communication. In this work, we collect and analyze all of the IP and TCP headers of packets seen on a network that either violate existing standards or should not appear in modern internets. Our goal is to determine the reason that these packets appear on the network and evaluate what proportion of such packets could cause actual damage. thus, we examine and devide the unusual packets obtained during our experiments into several categories based on their possible cause, which ranges form errors in network implementation to carefully constructed attack packets, and show the results. The traces analyzed were gathered at two different data sources at Ohio University—the university’s main Internet link connecting it to its ISP and a local network with student dormitory traffic—and provide a massive amount of statistical data.