Rights violation detection in multi-level digital rights management system

A multi-level digital rights management (DRM) system consists of owner, multiple levels of distributors and consumers. The distributors and consumers are given redistribution and usage rights using redistribution and usage licenses respectively. However, both redistribution and usage licenses can be violated by a malicious distributor/consumer to bypass the permissions and constraints in them. Thus, it is required to detect such violations. In this paper, we deal with the redistribution rights violation using a process called license validation. The problem of validation becomes complex when there exists multiple redistribution licenses for the same content with the distributors. In such cases, large number of comparisons may be needed and it may become difficult in real time in a large and distributed multi-level DRM system. Hence, we propose a bit-vector transform based license organization technique to do the validation efficiently. The proposed license organization method is compatible with the DRM related tasks such as license revocation and constraint range revocation. Mathematical analysis and experimental results show that the proposed license organization technique can do the validation efficiently.     

基于DRM证书机制的数字作品分发方案

针对消费者分发需求多样化与数字版权管理系统中严格限定传播范围之间的矛盾，建立分发模型描述各种分发问题，其中，用户之间的分发和设备之间的分发得以区别描述。在该模型的基础上提出一种采用双证书机制的分发方案。将数字作品分割后，通过使用独立密钥并配合相关的链型证书机制和分发权限管理，使消费者成为分发过程的参与人。分发权限的继承性赋予了消费者在分发过程中的控制权利。     

Determining the Proper Number and Price of Software Licenses

Software houses sell their products by transferring usage licenses of various software components to the customers. Depending on the kind of software, there are several different license types that allow controlled access of services. The two most popular types are the fixed license, which gives access rights for an identified workstation, and the floating license, which restricts the number of simultaneous users to a certain bound. The latter of these types is advantageous when the users do not demand full-time services and occasional lack of access is bearable. The problem of deciding the number of floating licenses is studied in the present paper. Based on the expected usage profile of the software, we calculate the minimal number of licenses that guarantees that the customers get service better than a given lower bound. The problem is studied by using certain queuing models, known as the Erlang toss system, the Erlang delay system, and the Engset model. None of these analytic models consider, however, the transient period that we analyze by means of simulation and by the so-called modified offered load approximation. We also give simple formulas presenting how the number of software licenses needed to keep the probability of nonaccess below a given blocking level grows as a function of the offered load, which is the proportion of the time used in the case that all requests were successful. Results of the study may be used for setting license prices and for determining the proper number of licenses.     

Turning Teenagers into Stores

Paradiso is a prototype of a system that lets consumers contact content providers to buy songs and videos-and to buy optional content-resale rights. In essence, the scheme would turn customers into content distributors, provide wider reach, and free up content providers' bandwidth. However, such an architecture requires strict security precautions and interoperable digital rights management standards among player manufacturers and content providers.     

开源许可证的选择:挑战和影响因素

开发者通常会为其开源代码选择不同的开源许可证来约束其使用条件,以期能有效地保护知识产权和维持软件的长远发展.然而,现有的开源许可证种类繁杂,开发者难以了解不同开源许可证间的差异,并且难以通过现有的开源许可证选择工具做出合适的选择——其使用要求开发者了解开源许可证相关条款并明确自己的业务需求.学术界虽然对开源许可证已有研...     

Service licensing: conceptualization, formalization, and expression

Service licensing enables a broader usage of services and a means for designing business strategies and relationships. A service license describes the terms and conditions that permit the use of and access to a service, in a machine interpretable way, which services can understand. The distribution of services spanning across organizational boundaries raises problems related to intellectual value that are less explored in service-oriented research. Being a way to manage the rights between service consumers and service providers, licenses become significant in services. As the nature of services differs significantly from traditional software and components, services prevent the direct adoption of software and component licenses. The concept of preserving certain rights of owner and presenting certain rights to consumer, addressed by service licensing, is incipient in the field of service-oriented computing. We propose a formalization of licensing clauses for an unambiguous definition of a service license. We extend the Open Digital Rights Language to implement the clauses of service licensing, in a machine interpretable way. We illustrate the concepts of service licensing based on a case study of service license compliance verification in a real world scenario.     

Nonlocality as well as rejection of realism are only sufficient (but non-necessary!) conditions for violation of Bell’s inequality

In this review we remind the viewpoint that violation of Bell’s inequality might be interpreted not only as an evidence of the alternative - either nonlocality or “death of reality” (under the assumption the quantum mechanics is incomplete). Violation of Bell’s type inequalities is a well known sufficient condition of probabilistic incompatibility of random variables - impossibility to realize them on a single probability space. Thus, in fact, we should take into account an additional interpretation of violation of Bell’s inequality - a few pairs of random variables (two-dimensional vector variables) involved in the EPR-Bohm experiment are incompatible. They could not be realized on a single Kolmogorov probability space. Thus, one can choose between: (a) completeness of quantum mechanics; (b) nonlocality; (c) “ death of reality”; (d) non-Kolmogorovness. In any event, violation of Bell’s inequality has a variety of possible interpretations. Hence, it could not be used to obtain the definite conclusion on the relation between quantum and classical models.     

Secure interoperable digital content distribution mechanisms in a multi-domain architecture

Current DRM systems use the Authorized Domain concept to allow sharing of DRM-enabled multimedia contents across multiple devices. However, some devices in an authorized domain may support only a limited number of DRM systems of the content providers due to their heterogeneous capabilities. Lack of interoperability among DRM systems enforces these devices to stick to a common DRM system which restricts the sharing of different DRM-enabled multimedia contents among them. Most of the current solutions use a translation entity to provide interoperability among different DRM standards with a trust assumption over that entity. This assumption may not assure the content providers that their contents and licenses will be translated and distributed in a secure and legal way. In this paper, we propose a secure interoperable content distribution mechanism for commercial and user generated contents among multiple authorized domains without any trust assumption on the translation entity.     

Understanding the role of licenses and evolution in open architecture software ecosystems

The role of software ecosystems in the development and evolution of open architecture systems whose components are subject to different licenses has received insufficient consideration. Such systems are composed of components potentially under two or more licenses, open source or proprietary or both, in an architecture in which evolution can occur by evolving existing components, replacing them, or refactoring. The software licenses of the components both facilitate and constrain the system's ecosystem and its evolution, and the licenses’ rights and obligations are crucial in producing an acceptable system. Consequently, software component licenses and the architectural composition of a system help to better define the software ecosystem niche in which a given system lies. Understanding and describing software ecosystem niches for open architecture systems is a key contribution of this work. An example open architecture software system that articulates different niches is employed to this end. We examine how the architecture and software component licenses of a composed system at design time, build time, and run time help determine the system's software ecosystem niche and provide insight and guidance for identifying and selecting potential evolutionary paths of system, architecture, and niches.     

High-dimension Bell inequalities

In this article, we review the relationship between Bell inequality and its associated polytopes and introduce a method to extend Bell inequalities to more parties. According to this method, the Bell inequality in n parties can be extended to n + 1 parties. Such generalization is nontrivial in that there is stronger violation for new inequalities.     

Spanning trees with a constraint on the number of leaves. A new formulation

In this paper we present a new extended model for the problem of finding a minimum cost spanning tree such that the number of leaves is equal to (greater than, less than) k. We show that with these variables we are able to derive stronger linking constraints in a flow based model permitting us, by using projection techniques, to derive a model with enhanced cut constraints. The new variables also permit us to strengthen, in an extended space, strong inequalities that are well known from the literature. We show that the strengthened inequalities imply a set of inequalities of exponential size, as presented previously by Fujie [8]. A new set of inequalities of exponential size are also implied by the new model will also be proposed. We also discuss the new model in the context of a related problem, the max-leaves problem where one wants to find a spanning tree with a maximum number of leaves. Computational results taken from several sets of instances known from the literature indicate that the new model improves previously known gaps for the three constrained versions and that despite the extra number of variables, it leads to best solution times in almost all cases. For the max-leaves problem the new model proves to be competitive with the existent approaches.     

Delay-dependent robust stability of stochastic delay systems with Markovian switching

In recent years, the stability of hybrid stochastic delay systems, one of the important issues in the study of stochastic systems, has received considerable attention. However, the existing results do not deal with the structure of the diffusion but estimate its upper bound, which induces conservatism. This paper studies delay-dependent robust stability of hybrid stochastic delay systems. A delay-dependent criterion for robust exponential stability of hybrid stochastic delay systems is presented in terms of linear matrix inequalities （LMIs）, which exploits the structure of the diffusion. Numerical examples are given to verify the effectiveness and less conservativeness of the proposed method.     

Is online multiple-stores cooperative promotion better than single-store promotion? Misprediction from evaluation mode

Inspired by the evaluation mode theory, we show online vendors mispredict consumers’ responses to different types of sales displays. While vendors predict that consumers evaluate a featured product more positively in a cooperative sales promotion (CSP; i.e., multiple stores promoting synchronously) than in an independent sales promotion (ISP; i.e., a single store promoting independently), consumers actually do the opposite. The reason is that vendors compare CSP with ISP and are able to evaluate depending on perceived acquisition utility; consumers, however, see either CSP or ISP, resulting in difficulty in accessing acquisition utility. Thus, they evaluate according to perceived transaction utility.     

WDOP‐based Summation Inequality and its Application to Exponential Stability of Linear Delay Difference Systems

This paper is concerned with the exponential stability analysis of linear delay difference systems. Firstly, a set of weighted discrete orthogonal polynomials (WDOPs) is established by using the Gram‐Schmidt orthogonalization process, and then two WDOPs‐based summation inequalities, including some existing summation inequalities as special cases, are developed. Secondly, these WDOPs‐based summation inequalities are applied to investigate the exponential stability criteria and explicit exponential estimates of solutions of linear delay difference systems. Finally, two numerical examples indicate that the proposed WDOPs‐based approach can derive the exponential stability condition with larger decay rate than the existing ones.     

适用于多通道视频流传输的循环线性2维表排序算法

多通道视频流传输的排序问题,在视频数据的传输领域有着重要的地位.提出了一种适用于多通道视频流的循环线性2维表排序方法,利用循环2维线性表的查表方式实现多通道的视频流分组进行排序处理.与传统的排序方法相比,它可以有效地消除时延不可控,排序复杂度过高,内存管理复杂等方面的缺陷.运用PC机对传统方法和该方法及其特点进行了测试,测试结果表明:传统排序方法在分组数量增加的条件下,排序时间呈指数式增长,而本文的方法的排序时间呈线性增长.与几种传统排序方法在排序时间的实验统计数据对比表明:在分组数量增加的情况下,该方法可以节约大量的排序时间.     

Efficient processing of integrity constraints in deductive databases

One major operation in a deductive database is to verify the contents of the database with integrity constraints whenever the database is changed. The number of facts and integrity constraints in a deductive database often makes the validation process the bottleneck of the system. In this paper, we describe a set of approaches to process integrity constraints efficiently on sequential computers and on massively parallel computers.     

一种采用一阶动态逻辑表示的数字权限描述模型

针对已有数字权限描述模型的动态语义描述能力较弱问题,提出了一个能够描述权限动 作状态的数字产品权限描述模型DDRM。基于一阶动态逻辑,定义了一个用于描述数字权限概念的 一阶动态逻辑符号系统DrFDL,并在DDRM模型基础上给出了DrFDL的语义结构(该语义结构能够 反映动作的动态特性)。基于DDRM模型还给出了一个表达权限证书的文法,应用DrFDL逻辑语言 给出了该文法生成的权限证书的形式语义,并探讨了该证书的确定性和有效性。     

Global exponential stability of recurrent neural networks forsolving optimization and related problems

Global exponential stability is a desirable property for dynamic systems. The paper studies the global exponential stability of several existing recurrent neural networks for solving linear programming problems, convex programming problems with interval constraints, convex programming problems with nonlinear constraints, and monotone variational inequalities. In contrast to the existing results on global exponential stability, the present results do not require additional conditions on the weight matrices of recurrent neural networks and improve some existing conditions for global exponential stability. Therefore, the stability results in the paper further demonstrate the superior convergence properties of the existing neural networks for optimization.     

Multiple query scheduling for distributed semantic caches

In distributed query processing systems, load balancing plays an important role in maximizing system throughput. When queries can leverage cached intermediate results, improving the cache hit ratio becomes as important as load balancing in query scheduling, especially when dealing with computationally expensive queries. The scheduling policies must be designed to take into consideration the dynamic contents of the distributed caching infrastructure. In this paper, we propose and discuss several distributed query scheduling policies that directly consider the available cache contents by employing distributed multidimensional indexing structures and an exponential moving average approach to predicting cache contents. These approaches are shown to produce better query plans and faster query response times than traditional scheduling policies that do not predict dynamic contents in distributed caches. We experimentally demonstrate the utility of the scheduling policies using MQO, which is a distributed, Grid-enabled, multiple query processing middleware system we developed to optimize query processing for data analysis and visualization applications.