An integral security kernel

As the user base of the Internet has grown tremendously, the need for secure services has increased accordingly. Most secure protocols, in digital business and other fields, use a combination of symmetric and asymmetric cryptography, random generators and hash functions in order to achieve confidentiality, integrity, and authentication. Our proposal is an integral security kernel based on a powerful mathematical scheme from which all of these cryptographic facilities can be derived. The kernel requires very little resources and has the flexibility of being able to trade off speed, memory or security; therefore, it can be efficiently implemented in a wide spectrum of platforms and applications, either software, hardware or low cost devices. Additionally, the primitives are comparable in security and speed to well known standards.

Mapping and exploring health systems' response to intimate partner violence in Spain

Background: For a comprehensive health sector response to intimate partner violence (IPV), interventions should target individual and health facility levels, along with the broader health systems level which includes issues of governance, financing, planning, service delivery, monitoring and evaluation, and demand generation. This study aims to map and explore the integration of IPV response in the Spanish national health system. Methods: Information was collected on five key areas based on WHO recommendations: policy environment, protocols, training, monitoring and prevention. A systematic review of public documents was conducted to assess 39 indicators in each of Spain’s 17 regional health systems. In addition, we performed qualitative content analysis of 26 individual interviews with key informants responsible for coordinating the health sector response to IPV in Spain. Results: In 88% of the 17 autonomous regions, the laws concerning IPV included the health sector response, but the integration of IPV in regional health plans was just 41%. Despite the existence of a supportive national structure, responding to IPV still relies strongly on the will of health professionals. All seventeen regions had published comprehensive protocols to guide the health sector response to IPV, but participants recognized that responding to IPV was more complex than merely following the steps of a protocol. Published training plans existed in 43% of the regional health systems, but none had institutionalized IPV training in medical and nursing schools. Only 12% of regional health systems collected information on the quality of the IPV response, and there are many limitations to collecting information on IPV within health services, for example underreporting, fears about confidentiality, and underuse of data for monitoring purposes. Finally, preventive activities that were considered essential were not institutionalized anywhere. Conclusions: Within the Spanish health system, differences exist in terms of achievements both between regions and between the areas assessed. Progress towards integration of IPV has been notable at the level of policy, less outstanding regarding health service delivery, and very limited in terms of preventive actions.

Delineating zones to increase geographical detail in individual response data files: An application to the Spanish 2011 Census of population

Due to confidentiality considerations, the microdata available from the 2011 Spanish Census have been codified at a provincial (NUTS 3) level except when the municipal (LAU 2) population exceeds 20,000 inhabitants (a requirement that is met by less than 5% of all municipalities). For the remainder of the municipalities within a given province, information is only provided for their classification in wide population intervals. These limitations, hampering territorially-focused socio-economic analyses, and more specifically, those related to the labour market, are observed in many other countries. This article proposes and demonstrates an automatic procedure aimed at delineating a set of areas that meet such population requirements and that may be used to re-codify the geographic reference in these cases, thereby increasing the territorial detail at which individual information is available. The method aggregates municipalities into clusters based on the optimisation of a relevant objective function subject to a number of statistical constraints, and is implemented using evolutionary computation techniques. Clusters are defined to fit outer boundaries at the level of labour market areas.

Modernizing Secure OLAP Applications with a Model-Driven Approach

The majority of the organizations store their historical business information in data warehouses which are queried to make strategic decisions by using online analytical processing (OLAP) tools. This information has to be correctly assured against unauthorized accesses, but nevertheless there are a great amount of legacy OLAP applications that have been developed without considering security aspects or these have been incorporated once the system was implemented. This work defines a reverse engineering process that allows us to obtain the conceptual model corresponding to a legacy OLAP application, and also analyses and represents the security aspects that could have established. This process has been aligned with a model-driven architecture for developing secure OLAP applications by defining the transformations needed to automatically apply it. Once the conceptual model has been extracted, it can be easily modified and improved with security, and automatically transformed to generate the new implementation.