Social scientists draw important lessons for modern development from the medieval Maghribi traders who, it has been argued, lacked effective legal mechanisms for contract enforcement and instead relied on informal sanctions based on collective ostracism within an exclusive coalition. We show that this claim is untenable. Not a single empirical example adduced as evidence of the putative coaliti...

Effective enforcement of laws and policies requires expending resources to prevent and detect offenders, as well as appropriate punishment schemes to deter violators. In particular, enforcement of privacy laws and policies in modern organizations that hold large volumes of personal information (e.g., hospitals, banks, and Web services providers) relies heavily on internal audit mechanisms. We s...

We argue in this paper that concurrency errors should be treated as exceptions, i.e., have fail-stop behavior and precise semantics. We propose an exception model based on conflict of synchronization-free regions, which precisely detects a broad class of data-races. We show that our exceptions provide enough guarantees to simplify high-level programming language semantics and debugging, but are...

The explosion of digital content and the heterogeneity of enterprise content sources have pushed existing data integration solutions to their boundaries. Although RDF can be used as a representation format for integrated data, enterprises have been slow to adopt this technology. One of the primary inhibitors to its widespread adoption in industry is the lack of fine grained access control enfor...

Managing modern information systems becomes increasingly complex. Therefore, the need for flexible mechanisms which assist system managers is evident. Management policies are means to control object behaviour. Considerable work has been done on the specification and classification of policies, but their enforcement is still an open research topic. In this paper we propose an event-driven approa...

In this paper, we integrate components for (a) resource provisioning and (b)information collection that allows for cost-effective enforcement of application QoS while tolerating imprecision of system state information. We discuss a family of policies for each component and provide mechanisms for dynamically selecting the appropriate combinations of the policy. Our objective is to select suitabl...

Virtual machines are widely accepted as a promising basis for building secure systems. However, while virtual machines offer effective mechanisms to create isolated environments, mechanisms that offer controlled interaction among VMs are immature. Some VM systems include flexible policy models and some enable MLS enforcement, but the flexible use of policy to control VM interactions has not bee...

Effective enforcement of laws and policies requires expending resources to prevent and detect offenders, as well as appropriate punishment schemes to deter violators. In particular, enforcement of privacy laws and policies in modern organizations that hold large volumes of personal information (e.g., hospitals, banks, and Web services providers) relies heavily on internal audit mechanisms. We s...

This paper makes two primary contributions toward establishing support for application-specific factors in middleware security mechanisms. First, it develops a simple classification framework for reasoning about the architecture of the security mechanisms in distributed applications that follow the decision-enforcement paradigm of the reference monitor. It uses the framework to demonstrate that...

This work addresses Grid fairshare allocation policy enforcement and presents FSGrid, a decentralized system for Grid-wide fairshare job prioritization. The presented system builds on three contributions; a flexible tree-based policy model that allows delegation of policy definition, a job prioritization algorithm based on local enforcement of distributed fairshare policies, and a decentralized...