© www.sarawickham.com This article first published 2003 Practising Midwife 6(11):23. Republished with permission for personal use only. Page numbers do not correspond to the original. Please do not reproduce/reprint without prior permission, thank you. When I first became involved with birth centres in the USA, they were seen as something of a compromise by many of those involved in setting the...

Policy is modeled as the outcome of negotiations between two three-party parliamentary states. An election in jurisdiction A determines the composition of the legislature that selects a representative to negotiate an intergovernmental policy agreement with the representative from the legislature of jurisdiction B. Negotiations are modeled using Nash’s (1950) bargaining framework, modified to ac...

What prevents majorities from extracting surplus from minorities in legislatures? We study an infinite horizon game where a legislative body votes to determine distributive policy each period. Proposals accepted by a simple majority are implemented, otherwise the status quo allocation prevails. We construct symmetric Markov perfect equilibria that exhibit compromise in the following sense: if t...

Cryptosystems rely on the assumption that the computer end-points can securely store and use cryptographic keys. Yet, this assumption is rather hard to justify in practice. New software vulnerabilities are discovered every day, and malware is pervasive on mobile devices and desktop PCs. This thesis provides research on how to mitigate private key compromise in three different cases. The first c...

Brute-force attacks are omnipresent and manyfold on the Internet, and aim at compromising user accounts by issuing large numbers of authentication attempts on applications and daemons. Widespread targets of such attacks are Secure SHell (SSH) and Web applications, for example. The impact of brute-force attacks and compromises resulting thereof is often severe: Once compromised, attackers gain a...

A realistic threat model for cryptographic protocols or for languagebased security should include a dynamically growing population of principals (or security levels), some of which may be compromised, that is, come under the control of the adversary. We explore such a threat model within a pi-calculus. A new process construct records the ordering between security levels, including the possibili...