An analysis of TLS handshake proxying

Content delivery networks (CDNs) are an essential component of modern website infrastructures: edge servers located closer to users cache content, increasing robustness and capacity while decreasing latency. However, this situation becomes complicated for HTTPS content that is to be delivered using the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol: the edge server must be able to carry out TLS handshakes for the cached domain. Most commercial CDNs require that the domain owner give their certificate's private key to the CDN's edge server or abandon caching of HTTPS content entirely. We examine the security and performance of a recently commercialized delegation technique in which the domain owner retains possession of their private key and splits the TLS state machine geographically with the edge server using a private key proxy service. This allows the domain owner to limit the amount of trust given to the edge server while maintaining the benefits of CDN caching. On the performance front, we find that latency is slightly worse compared to the insecure approach, but still significantly better than the domain owner serving the content directly. On the security front, we enumerate the security goals for TLS handshake proxying and identify a subtle difference between the security of RSA key transport and signed-Diffie--Hellman in TLS handshake proxying; we also discuss timing side channel resistance of the key server and the effect of TLS session resumption.

Loyalty (Brand Loyalty)

Loyalty is a desired marketing outcome for products ranging from fast-moving consumer goods, services, durables, and ideas products such as political parties and social behaviors. Evidence has shown that a base of loyal customers is advantageous for an organization as it reduces the marketing cost of doing business and improves profitability. The approaches to loyalty have varied over the decades with various schools of thoughts toward definitions, conceptualizations, and measurement. The need for understanding the nature of the product and consumer's behavior to determine the appropriate approach to loyalty is emphasized in this article. In this article, we outline the historical development of brand loyalty, the major approaches to the construct (attitudinal and behavioral) and new approaches that deconstruct attitudinal loyalty into its subcomponent parts.

Complete and interpretable conformance checking of business processes

This article presents a method for checking the conformance between an event log capturing the actual execution of a business process, and a model capturing its expected or normative execution. Given a business process model and an event log, the method returns a set of statements in natural language describing the behavior allowed by the process model but not observed in the log and vice versa. The method relies on a unified representation of process models and event logs based on a well-known model of concurrency, namely event structures. Specifically, the problem of conformance checking is approached by folding the input event log into an event structure, unfolding the process model into another event structure, and comparing the two event structures via an error-correcting synchronized product. Each behavioral difference detected in the synchronized product is then verbalized as a natural language statement. An empirical evaluation shows that the proposed method scales up to real-life datasets while producing more concise and higher-level difference descriptions than state-of-the-art conformance checking methods.

Situated interpretation in computational creativity

This paper describes, formalizes and implements an approach to computational creativity based on situated interpretation. The paper introduces the notions of framing and reframing of conceptual spaces based on empirical studies as the driver for this research. It uses concepts from situated cognition, and situated interpretation in particular, to be the basis of a formal model of the movement between conceptual spaces. This model is implemented using rules within interacting neural networks. This implementation demonstrates behaviour similar to that observed in studies of human designers.

Teacher peer support in social network sites

This paper describes the types of support that teachers are accessing through the Social Network Site (SNS) 'Facebook'. It describes six ways in which teachers support one another within online groups. It presents evidence from a study of a large, open group of teachers online over a twelve week period, repeated with multiple groups a year later over a one week period. The findings suggest that large open groups in SNSs can be a useful source of pragmatic advice for teachers but that these groups are rarely a place for reflection on or feedback about teaching practice.