Biblio

Electronic voting systems have enhanced efficiency in student elections management in universities, supporting such elections to become less expensive, logistically simple, with higher accuracy levels as compared to manually conducted elections. However, e-voting systems that are confined to campus hall voting inhibits access to eligible voters who are away from campus. This study examined the challenges of lack of wide access and impersonation of voter in the student elections of 2018 in Kabarak University. The main objective of this study was therefore to upgrade the offline electronic voting system through developing a secure online voting system and deploying the system for use in the 2019 student elections at Kabarak University. The resultant system and development process employed demonstrate the applicability of a secure online voting not only in the higher education context, but also in other democracies where infusion of online access and authentication in the voting processes is a requisite.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the use of blockchain technology for self-organization of network communities. Network communities are characterized by the key role of trust in personal interactions, the need for repeated interactions, strong and weak ties within the network, social learning as the mechanism of self-organization. Therefore, in network communities reputation is the central component of social action, assessment of the situation, and formation of the expectations. The current proliferation of virtual network communities requires the development of appropriate technical infrastructure in the form of reputation systems - programs that provide calculation of network members reputation and organization of their cooperation and interaction. Traditional reputation systems have vulnerabilities in the field of information security and prevention of abusive behavior of agents. Overcoming these restrictions is possible through integration of reputation systems and blockchain technology that allows to increase transparency of reputation assessment system and prevent attempts of manipulation the system and social engineering. At the same time, the most promising is the use of blockchain-oracles to ensure communication between the algorithms of blockchain-based reputation system and the external information environment. The popularization of blockchain technology and its implementation in various spheres of social management, production control, economic exchange actualizes the problems of using digital technologies in political processes and their impact on the formation of digital authoritarianism, digital democracy and digital anarchism. The paper emphasizes that blockchain technology and reputation systems can equally benefit both the resources of government control and tools of democratization and public accountability to civil society or even practices of avoiding government. Therefore, it is important to take into account the problems of political institutionalization, path dependence and the creation of differentiated incentives as well as the technological aspects.

Substantial empirical evidence, including the success of synthetic graph generation models as well as of analytical methodologies, suggests that large, real graphs have a recursive community structure. The latter results, in part at least, in other important properties of these graphs such as low diameter, high clustering coefficient values, heavy degree distribution tail, and clustered graph spectrum. Notice that this structure need not be official or moderated like Facebook groups, but it can also take an ad hoc and unofficial form depending on the functionality of the social network under study as for instance the follow relationship on Twitter or the connections between news aggregators on Reddit. Community discovery is paramount in numerous applications such as political campaigns, digital marketing, crowdfunding, and fact checking. Here a tensor representation for Twitter subgraphs is proposed which takes into consideration both the followfollower relationships but also the coherency in hashtags. Community structure discovery then reduces to the computation of Tucker tensor decomposition, a higher order counterpart of the well-known unsupervised learning method of singular value decomposition (SVD). Tucker decomposition clearly outperforms the SVD in terms of finding a more compact community size distribution in experiments done in Julia on a Twitter subgraph. This can be attributed to the facts that the proposed methodology combines both structural and functional Twitter elements and that hashtags carry an increased semantic weight in comparison to ordinary tweets.

"Good Governance" - may it be corporate or governmental, is a badly needed focus area in the world today where the companies and governments are struggling to survive the political and economical turmoil around the globe. All governments around the world have a tendency of expanding the size of their government, but eventually they would be forced to think reducing the size by incorporating information technology as a way to provide services to the citizens effectively and efficiently. Hence our attempt is to offer a complete solution from birth of a citizen till death encompassing all the necessary services related to the well being of a person living in a society. Our research and analysis would explore the pros and cons of using IT as a solution to our problems and ways to implement them for a best outcome in e-Governance occasionally comparing with the present scenario when relevant.

The unprecedented transparency shown by the Netherlands intelligence services in exposing Russian GRU officers in October 2018 is indicative of a number of new trends in state handling of cyber conflict. US public indictments of foreign state intelligence officials, and the UK's deliberate provision of information allowing the global media to “dox” GRU officers implicated in the Salisbury poison attack in early 2018, set a precedent for revealing information that previously would have been confidential. This is a major departure from previous practice where the details of state-sponsored cyber attacks would only be discovered through lengthy investigative journalism (as with Stuxnet) or through the efforts of cybersecurity corporations (as with Red October). This paper uses case studies to illustrate the nature of this departure and consider its impact, including potentially substantial implications for state handling of cyber conflict. The paper examines these implications, including: · The effect of transparency on perception of conflict. Greater public knowledge of attacks will lead to greater public acceptance that countermeasures should be taken. This may extend to public preparedness to accept that a state of declared or undeclared war exists with a cyber aggressor. · The resulting effect on legality. This adds a new element to the long-running debates on the legality of cyber attacks or counter-attacks, by affecting the point at which a state of conflict is politically and socially, even if not legally, judged to exist. · The further resulting effect on permissions and authorities to conduct cyber attacks, in the form of adjustment to the glaring imbalance between the means and methods available to aggressors (especially those who believe themselves already to be in conflict) and defenders. Greater openness has already intensified public and political questioning of the restraint shown by NATO and EU nations in responding to Russian actions; this trend will continue. · Consequences for deterrence, both specifically within cyber conflict and also more broadly deterring hostile actions. In sum, the paper brings together the direct and immediate policy implications, for a range of nations and for NATO, of the new apparent policy of transparency.

Faced with a turbulent economic, political and social environment, Companies need to build effective risk management systems in their supply chains. Risk management can only be effective when the risks identification and analysis are enough accurate. In this perspective, this paper proposes a risk assessment approach based on the analytic hierarchy process and group decision making. In this study, a new method is introduced that will reduce the impact of incoherent judgments on group decision-making, It is, the “reduced weight function” that decreases the weight associated to a member of the expert panel based on the consistency of its judgments.

In any security system, there are many security issues that are related to either the sender or the receiver of the message. Quantum computing has proven to be a plausible approach to solving many security issues such as eavesdropping, replay attack and man-in-the-middle attack. In the e-voting system, one of these issues has been solved, namely, the integrity of the data (ballot). In this paper, we propose a scheme that solves the problem of repudiation that could occur when the voter denies the value of the ballot either for cheating purposes or for a real change in the value by a third party. By using an entanglement concept between two parties randomly, the person who is going to verify the ballots will create the entangled state and keep it in a database to use it in the future for the purpose of the non-repudiation of any of these two voters.