JXTAnonym: An anonymity layer for JXTA services messaging

With the evolution of the P2P research eld, new problems, such as those related with information security, have arisen. It is important to provide security mechanisms to P2P systems, since it has already become one of the key issues when evaluating them. However, even though many P2P systems have been adapted to provide a security baseline to their underlying applications, more advanced capabilities are becoming necessary. Speci cally, privacy preservation and anonymity are deemed essential to make the information society sustainable. Unfortunately, sometimes, it may be di cult to attain anonymity unless it is included into the system's initial design. The JXTA open protocols speci cation is a good example of this kind of scenario. This work studies how to provide anonymity to JXTA's architecture in a feasible manner and proposes an extension which allows deployed services to process two-way messaging without disclosing the endpoints'identities to third parties.

Towards secure mobile P2P applications using JXME

Mobile devices have become ubiquitous, allowing the integration of new information from a large range of devices. However, the development of new applications requires a powerful framework which simplifies their construction. JXME is the JXTA implementation for mobile devices using J2ME, its main value being its simplicity when creating peer-to-peer (P2P) applications on limited devices. On that regard, an issue that is becoming veryimportant in the recent times is being able to provide a security baseline to such applications. This paper analyzes the currentstate of security in JXME and proposes a simple security mechanism in order to protect JXME applications against a broad range of vulnerabilities.

JXTA-Overlay P2P Platform and Its Application for Robot Control

The design of an efficient collaborative multirobot framework that ensures the autonomy and the individualrequirements of the involved robots is a very challenging task. This requires designing an efficient platform for inter-robot communication. P2P is a good approach to achieve this goal. P2P aims at making the communication ubiquitous thereby crossing the communication boundary and has many attractive features to use it as a platform for collaborative multi-robot environments. In this work, we present the JXTA Overlay P2P system and its application for robot control. Since JXTAOverlay is able to overcome Firewalls, Routers and NATs, it is possible to control end-devices in a WAN without changing the network security policy. We used JXTA-Overlay for the control of robot motors. We evaluated the proposed system by many experiments and have shown that the proposed system has a good performance and can be used successfully for the control of robot.

A Forwarding Cooperation Protocol for Plain and Cluster-based Ad Hoc Networks

Peer-reviewed

Collaborative group membership and access control for JXTA

Peer-reviewed

Aggregating and Deploying Network Access Control Policies

Peer-reviewed

Security prices and market transparency: the role of prior information

This paper analyzes the role of traders' priors (proper versus improper) on the implications of market transparency by comparing a pre-trade transparent market with an opaque market in a set-up based on Madhavan (1996). We show that prices may be more informative in the opaque market, regardless of how priors are modelled. In contrast, the comparison of market liquidity and volatility in the two market structures are affected by prior specification. Key words: Market microstructure, Transparency, Prior information

When ESDP confronts ENP: security sector reform as a bridge in the EU’s foreign policy

The European Neighbourhood Policy’s birth has taken place in parallel with the renewed momentum of the European Security and Defence Policy, which has launched 14 operations since 2003. Both policies’ instruments have converged in the neighbouring area covered by ENP: Georgia, in the East and the Palestinian Territories in the South. In both cases, the Security Sector Reform strategies have been the main focus for ESDP and an important objective for ENP. In this paper, two objectives are pursued: first, to assess the EU’s involvement in both cases in SSR terms; and second, to analyse whether the convergence of ESDP operations with a broader EU neighbourhood policy implies that the former has become an instrument for the a EU external action.

Asymmetric information and trade policy

Economists understand protectionism as a costly mechanism to redistribute from the average citizen to special-interest groups; yet political platforms that deviate from free trade have surprising popular appeal. I present an explanation based on heterogeneous information across citizens whose voting decision has an intensive margin. For each politician and each sector, the optimal trade-policy choice caters to the preferences of those voters who are more likely to be informed of that proposal. An overall protectionist bias emerges because in every industry producers are better informed than consumers. This asymmetry emerges in equilibrium because co-workers share industry-specific knwoledge, and because producers have greater incentives to engage in costly learning about their sector. My model implies that more widespread information about trade policy for an industry is associated with lower protection. Cross-sectoral evidence on U.S. non-tariff barriers and newspaper coverage is consistent with this prediction.

Heterogeneous information and trade policy

Protectionism enjoys surprising popular support, in spite of deadweight losses. At thesame time, trade barriers appear to decline with public information about protection.This paper develops an electoral model with heterogeneously informed voters whichexplains both facts and predicts the pattern of trade policy across industries. In themodel, each agent endogenously acquires more information about his sector of employment. As a result, voters support protectionism, because they learn more about thetrade barriers that help them as producers than those that hurt them as consumers.In equilibrium, asymmetric information induces a universal protectionist bias. Thestructure of protection is Pareto inefficient, in contrast to existing models. The modelpredicts a Dracula effect: trade policy for a sector is less protectionist when there ismore public information about it. Using a measure of newspaper coverage across industries, I find that cross-sector evidence from the United States bears out my theoreticalpredictions.

Research joint ventures and optimal R&D policy with asymmetric information

When to allow Research Joint Ventures (RJVs) or not is an importantinstrument in the development of an optimal R&D policy. Theregulator, however, is unlikely to know all the relevant informationto regulate R&D optimally. The extent to which there existappropriability problems between the firms is one such variable thatis private information to the firms in the industry. In a duopolysetting we analyze the characteristics of a second-best R&D policywhere the government can either allow RJVs or not and give lump-sumsubsidies to the parties involved. The second-best R&D policy withoutsubsidies will either block some welfare improving RJVs or allow somewelfare reducing ones. With lump-sum subsidies, the second-best policytrades off the expected subsidy cost with allowing welfare decreasingRJVs or blocking welfare increasing ones.