Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (TTP) is one of the first and most important theoretical justifications of the separation of religion from philosophy and from politics. The separation of church and state and the separation of theology from other scientific disciplines are of course defining moments of contemporary secularity. While it can easily appear from certain religiously conserva...

Recent progress in the theoretical description of inclusive heavy flavour decays is reviewed. After an outline of the theoretical methods applications to total decay rates and semileptonic decay spectra are presented. Contribution to the workshop on “Heavy Quark Physics”, December 13 – 16, 1994, Bad Honnef, Germany. TTP 95–06 March 1995

This letter presents a secure authentication protocol which supports both the privacy of messages and the authenticity of the communicating parties. A scheme for extending a secure authentication protocol to improve the security of the communicating parties is also proposed.

This paper introduces a novel approach or architecture for fraud-resistant and privacy-friendly Electronic Traffic Pricing (ETP). One salient contribution is that it can satisfy the seemingly incompatible requirements of a privacy-friendly and socalled “thin” solution. The proposed approach relies on regularly sending to the traffic Pricing Authority (PA) only hashes of travelled trajectories a...

Reputation mechanisms provide a promising alternative to the traditional security methods for preventing malicious behavior in online transactions. However, obtaining correct reputation information is not trivial. In the absence of objective authorities (or trusted third parties) which can oversee every transaction, mechanism designers have to ensure that it is rational for the participating pa...

This paper ooers a solution to a problem of software distribution on the Internet. The problem is that malicious software can be posted to the public with no accountability. When this software is run, it inherits the privileges of the user who runs it. Unfortunately, it is very common for users to execute software obtained on the Internet with no assurance that it is genuine. The solution ooere...

In this paper, a method is described for user self-profiling when engaged in e-commerce over the Internet, by which customers can have greater control over profiles relating to their behaviour or preferences and can exploit this information without revealing their identity. This is achieved using trusted agents that exploit Trusted Computing Platform technology (cf. www.trustedpc.org).

A mathematical formula for estimating spatial release from masking (SRM) in a cocktail party environment would be useful as a simpler alternative to computationally intensive algorithms and may enhance understanding of underlying mechanisms. The experiment presented herein was designed to provide a strong test of a model that divides SRM into contributions of asymmetry and angular separation [B...

A novel social network based group decision making (SN-GDM) model with experts’ weights not provided beforehand and with the following four tuple information: trust; distrust; hesitancy; and inconsistency, is introduced. The concepts of trust score (TS) and knowledge degree (KD) are defined and combined into a trust order space. Then, a strict trust ranking order relation of trust function valu...

Most of the research work for enforcing security policies on smartphones considered coarse-grained policies, e.g. either to allow an application to run or not. In this paper we present CRePE, the first system that is able to enforce fine-grained policies, e.g. that vary while an application is running, that also depend on the context of the smartphone. A context can be defined by the status of ...