A Provenance-Aware Policy Language (cProvl) and a Data Traceability Model (cProv) for the Cloud

Provenance plays a pivotal in tracing the origin of something and determining how and why something had occurred. With the emergence of the cloud and the benefits it encompasses, there has been a rapid proliferation of services being adopted by commercial and government sectors. However, trust and security concerns for such services are on an unprecedented scale. Currently, these services expose very little internal working to their customers; this can cause accountability and compliance issues especially in the event of a fault or error, customers and providers are left to point finger at each other. Provenance-based traceability provides a mean to address part of this problem by being able to capture and query events occurred in the past to understand how and why it took place. However, due to the complexity of the cloud infrastructure, the current provenance models lack the expressibility required to describe the inner-working of a cloud service. For a complete solution, a provenance-aware policy language is also required for operators and users to define policies for compliance purpose. The current policy standards do not cater for such requirement. To address these issues, in this paper we propose a provenance (traceability) model cProv, and a provenance-aware policy language (cProvl) to capture traceability data, and express policies for validating against the model. For implementation, we have extended the XACML3.0 architecture to support provenance, and provided a translator that converts cProvl policy and request into XACML type.

Greece, global fault-lines and the disintegrative logics of Germany’s primacy in Europe

Post-Keynesian, heterodox and Marxist political economists have rightly argued that the eurozone crisis is not a fiscal crisis but a balance of payments crisis, mainly caused by the pivotal position of Germany in the European Monetary Union (EMU) and its neo-mercantilist model of growth (low wage, low inflation and export-led). This view, however, sees the split between core and periphery in the European Union as something created with the introduction of the EMU in 1999. This chapter contends that this is not the case. By putting forth a global fault-lines historical perspective and focusing on the case of Greece, it is argued that the problem is not the introduction of the EMU but the geopolitical and macroeconomic asymmetries between core and periphery in Europe since the inception of what vaguely – and even inaccurately – can be defined as ‘European modernity’. Global fault-lines offer a macro-historical and macroeconomic understanding of crises seen as structural events generated by the evolving and contradictory tendencies of capitalism as a world system. It is not just a political economy perspective but a perspective that encompasses many instances of the social, especially geopolitical and geocultural structures.