This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Network and System Security, NSS 2012, held in Wuyishan, Fujian, China, in November 2012. The 39 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 173 submissions. The papers cover the following topics: network security, system security, public key cryptography, privacy, authentication, security analysis, and access control.

Information Hiding: Steganography and Watermarking - Attacks and Countermeasures deals with information hiding. With the proliferation of multimedia on the Internet, information hiding addresses two areas of concern: privacy of information from surveillance (steganography) and protection of intellectual property (digital watermarking). Steganography (literally, covered writing) explores methods to hide the existence of hidden messages. These methods include invisible ink, microdot, digital signature, covert channel, and spread spectrum communication. Digital watermarks represent a commercial application of steganography. Watermarks can be used to track the copyright and ownership of electronic media. In this volume, the authors focus on techniques for hiding information in digital media. They analyze the hiding techniques to uncover their limitations. These limitations are employed to devise attacks against hidden information. The goal of these attacks is to expose the existence of a secret message or render a digital watermark unusable. In assessing these attacks, countermeasures are developed to assist in protecting digital watermarking systems.Understanding the limitations of the current methods will lead us to build more robust methods that can survive various manipulation and attacks. The more information that is placed in the public's reach on the Internet, the more owners of such information need to protect themselves from theft and false representation. Systems to analyze techniques for uncovering hidden information and recover seemingly destroyed information will be useful to law enforcement authorities in computer forensics and digital traffic analysis. Information Hiding: Steganography and Watermarking - Attacks and Countermeasures presents the authors' research contributions in three fundamental areas with respect to image-based steganography and watermarking: analysis of data hiding techniques, attacks against hidden information, and countermeasures to attacks against digital watermarks. Information Hiding: Steganography and Watermarking -- Attacks and Countermeasures is suitable for a secondary text in a graduate level course, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry.

As a foreword, here we publish an email letter of Late Professor Herb Simon, Nobel Laureate, that he wrote on the occasion ofthe death of the fatherofa friend. This letterofcondolence, more than any other wisdom, tells about the essence of the process of scientific creation, which is so important for both, the specific subject being covered by this book, and for the general science. When asked to address an SSGRR conference in Italy, prior to his death, Professor Herb Simon agreed that these lines be presented to all those who are interested in understanding the real essence oftheir own scientific struggle. Dear Professor Milutinovic: I want to extend my deepest sympathy to you and your family on the death of your father. His career was a very distinguished one, and his life spanned a most complex and difficult sequence of epochs in your country's history. Our generation (I am just a year younger than he was), like all its predecessors, leaves many tasks - hopefully no more than it inherited - for the next generation to take up; but even knowing that it must be so does not remove one's senseofloss in the parting.

High-dimensional spaces arise as a way of modelling datasets with many attributes. Such a dataset can be directly represented in a space spanned by its attributes, with each record represented as a point in the space with its position depending on its attribute values. Such spaces are not easy to work with because of their high dimensionality: our intuition about space is not reliable, and measures such as distance do not provide as clear information as we might expect.

There are three main areas where complex high dimensionality and large datasets arise naturally: data collected by online retailers, preference sites, and social media sites, and customer relationship databases, where there are large but sparse records available for each individual; data derived from text and speech, where the attributes are words and so the corresponding datasets are wide, and sparse; and data collected for security, defense, law enforcement, and intelligence purposes, where the datasets are large and wide. Such datasets are usually understood either by finding the set of clusters they contain or by looking for the outliers, but these strategies conceal subtleties that are often ignored. In this book the author suggests new ways of thinking about high-dimensional spaces using two models: a skeleton that relates the clusters to one another; and boundaries in the empty space between clusters that provide new perspectives on outliers and on outlying regions.

The book will be of value to practitioners, graduate students and researchers."

First, I would like to thank my principal supervisor Dr Qiang Shen for all his help, advice and friendship throughout. Many thanks also to my second supervisor Dr Peter Jarvis for his enthusiasm, help and friendship. I would also like to thank the other members of the Approximate and Qualitative Reasoning group at Edinburgh who have also helped and inspired me. This project has been funded by an EPSRC studentship, award num ber 97305803. I would like, therefore, to extend my gratitude to EPSRC for supporting this work. Many thanks to the staff at Edinburgh University for all their help and support and for promptly fixing any technical problems that I have had . My whole family have been both encouraging and supportive throughout the completion of this book, for which I am forever indebted. York, April 2003 Ian Miguel Contents List of Figures XV 1 Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1. 1 Solving Classical CSPs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 1. 2 Applicat ions of Classical CSP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1. 3 Limitations of Classical CSP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 1. 3. 1 Flexible CSP 6 1. 3. 2 Dynamic CSP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 1. 4 Dynamic Flexible CSP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 1. 5 Flexible Planning: a DFCSP Application . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 1. 6 Structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 1. 7 Contributions and their Significance 11 2 The Constraint Satisfaction Problem 13 2. 1 Constraints and Constraint Graphs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 2. 2 Tree Search Solution Techniques for Classical CSP . . . . . . . . . . 16 2. 2. 1 Backtrack . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 2. 2. 2 Backjumping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 2. 2. 3 Conflict-Directed Backjumping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 2. 2. 4 Backmarking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Human-Centered e-Business focuses on analysis, design and development of human-centered e-business systems. The authors illustrate the benefits of the human-centered approach in intelligent e-sales recruitment application, integrating data mining technology with decision support model for profiling transaction behavior of internet banking customers, user-centered context dependent data organization using XML, knowledge management, and optimizing the search process through human evaluation in an intelligent interactive multimedia application. The applications described in this work, facilitates both e-business analysis from a business professional's perspective, and human-centered system design from a system development perspective. These applications employ a range of internet and soft computing technologies.

This book deals with Web applications in product design and manufacture, thus filling an information gap in digital manufacturing in the Internet era. It helps both developers and users to appreciate the potentials, as well as difficulties, in developing and adopting Web applications. The objective is to equip potential users and practitioners of Web applications with a better appreciation of the technology. In addition, Web application developers and new researchers in this field will gain a clearer understanding of the selection of system architecture and design, development and implementation techniques, and deployment strategies. The book is divided into two main parts. The first part gives an overview of Web and Internet and the second explains eight typical Web applications.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems, PRIMA 2013, held in Dunedin, New Zealand, in December 2013. The conference was co-located with the 26th Australasian Artificial International Conference, AI 2013. The 24 revised full papers presented together with 18 short papers and 2 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 81 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on foundations of agents and multi-agent systems; agent and multi-agent system architectures; agent-oriented software engineering; agent-based modelling and simulation; cooperation/collaboration, coordination/communication; hybrid technologies, application domains; and applications.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second CCF Internet Conference of China, ICoC 2013, held in Zhangjiajie, China, in July 2013. The 24 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 63 submissions. The papers address issues such as future Internet architecture, Internet routing, network security, network management, data center networks, green networks, wireless networks, P2P networks, mobile Internet and the Internet of Things.

This volume contains 9 thoroughly refereed and revised papers detailing recent advances in research on designing trading agents and mechanisms for agent-mediated e-commerce. They were originally presented at the 12th International Workshop on Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce (AMEC 2010), collocated with AAMAS 2010 in Toronto, Canada, or the 2010 Workshop on Trading Agent Design and Analysis (TADA 2010), collocated with EC 2010 in Cambridge, MA, USA. The papers examine emerging topics such as ad auctions and supply chains, or the interactions between competing markets, and present novel algorithms and rigorous theoretical results. Several of them evaluate their results using real data from large e-commerce sites or from experiments with human traders.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th Security Research Conference, Future Security 2012, held in Bonn, Germany, in September 2012. The 78 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 137 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on supply chain and critical infrastructure protection; security situational awareness; crisis management; security for critical infrastructure and urban areas; sensor technology; social, psychological and political aspects; cyber defense and information security; maritime and border security; detection of hazardous materials; food chain security; aviation security; ergonomic aspects.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Electronic Commerce and Web Technologies (EC-Web) held in Vienna, Austria, in September 2012. The 15 full and four short papers accepted for EC-Web, selected from 45 submissions, were carefully reviewed based on their originality, quality, relevance, and presentation. They are organized into topical sections on recommender systems, security and trust, mining and semantic services, negotiation, and agents and business services.

In recent years, the field of information and communication technology has started to change dramatically. Carriers are threatened by high revenue losses requiring them to identify new revenue potentials beyond their core business. Targeted advertising can be one of these revenue opportunities. Christian Schlee provides a broad overview of the latest developments and trends in targeted advertising in the ICT space. The author focuses on the technological aspects of targeted advertising, but also covers business and legal aspects. He analyzes the most interesting use cases in the Web, IPTV, the mobile environment, and in converged scenarios and examines important technological key building blocks.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the IFIP WG 8.4, 8.9, TC 5 International Cross Domain Conference and Workshop on Availability, Reliability and Security, CD-ARES 2012, held in Prague, Czech Republic, in August 2012. The 50 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the volume. The papers concentrate on the many aspects of information systems bridging the gap between research results in computer science and the many application fields. They are organized in the following topical sections: cross-domain applications: aspects of modeling and validation; trust,security, privacy, and safety; mobile applications; data processing and management; retrieval and complex query processing; e-commerce; and papers from the colocated International Workshop on Security and Cognitive Informatics for Homeland Defense, SeCIHD 2012.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Workshop on Internet of Things, IOT 2012, held in Changsha, China, during August 17-19. The 95 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on wireless sensor networks; RFID; sensors and equipments; data processing; security; applications and others.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 16th International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses, former Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection, RAID 2013, held in Rodney Bay, St. Lucia in October 2013. The volume contains 22 full papers that were carefully reviewed and selected from 95 submissions, as well as 10 poster papers selected from the 23 submissions. The papers address all current topics in computer security ranged from hardware-level security, server, web, mobile, and cloud-based security, malware analysis, and web and network privacy.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Provable Security, ProvSec 2013, held in Melaka, Malaysia, in October 2013. The 18 full papers presented together with 1 invited talk were carefully reviewed and selected from 44 submissions. The papers cover the following topics: key exchange protocols, security models, signature and signcryption schemes, authenticated encryption, theory, and public key encryption.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 7th Mediterranean Conference on Information Systems, MCIS 2012, held in Guimaraes, Portugal, in September 2012. MCIS 2012 comprised theories, research, and practices based on knowledge management and innovations in organizations, society, and businesses. The 18 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 89 submissions. They are organized in topical sections on: emerging and innovative information systems, enterprise systems and enterprise engineering, Web 2.0 enabled business models, information quality management and data accuracy in innovative IS, and ICT applications in healthcare.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 15th International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses, former Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection, RAID 2012, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands in September 2012. The 18 full and 12 poster papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 84 submissions. The papers address all current topics in virtualization, attacks and defenses, host and network security, fraud detection and underground economy, web security, intrusion detection.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 20 th International Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization, held in Montreal, Canada, in July 2012. The 22 long and 7 short papers of the Research Paper Track presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 101 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on user engagement; trust; user motivation, attention, and effort; recommender systems (including topics such as matrix factorization, critiquing, noise and spam in recommender systems); user centered design and evaluation; educational data mining; modeling learners; user models in microblogging; and visualization. The Industry Paper Track covered innovative commercial implementations or applications of UMAP technologies, and experience in applying recent research advances in practice. 2 long and 1 short papers were accepted of 5 submissions.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th IFIP TC 6/TC 11 International Conference on Communications and Multimedia Security, CMS 2012, held in Canterbury, UK, in September 2012. The 6 revised full papers presented together with 8 short papers, 8 extended abstracts describing the posters that were discussed at the conference, and 2 keynote talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 43 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on image and handwriting analysis, authentication and performance, biometrics, forensics and watermarking, and communications security.

The next generation of Business Process Management (BPM) methods and tools will support the development of a new generation of service-enabled applications that change and evolve over time. The trend is moving from relatively stable, organization-specific applications to dynamic ones supporting business processes. This book is an outcome of the International Workshop on Business System Management and Engineering (BSME 2010), held in Malaga, Spain, in June/July 2010, in conjunction with the TOOLS 2010 federated conferences and under the aegis of the EU Network of Excellence on Service Software and Systems (S-Cube). The goal of the workshop was to bring together experts in the fields of business process management, service-oriented architectures, and service security to discuss the current state of research and identify new issues, challenges, and research directions. The results of these discussions are reflected in this book.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th European Symposium on Computer Security, ESORICS 2013, held in Egham, UK, in September 2013.

The 43 papers included in the book were carefully reviewed and selected from 242 papers. The aim of ESORICS is to further the progress of research in computer security by establishing a European forum for bringing together researchers in this area, by promoting the exchange of ideas with system developers and by encouraging links with researchers in related areas. The papers cover all topics related to security, privacy and trust in computer systems and networks.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the workshop on Usable Security, USEC 2013, and the third Workshop on Applied Homomorphic Cryptography, WAHC 2013, held in conjunction with the 17th International Conference on Financial Cryptology and Data Security, FC 2013, in Okinawa, Japan. The 16 revised full papers presented were carefully selected from numerous submissions and cover all aspects of data security. The goal of the USEC workshop was to engage on all aspects of human factors and usability in the context of security. The goal of the WAHC workshop was to bring together professionals, researchers and practitioners in the area of computer security and applied cryptography with an interest in practical applications of homomorphic encryption, secure function evaluation, private information retrieval or searchable encryption to present, discuss, and share the latest findings in the field, and to exchange ideas that address real-world problems with practical solutions using homomorphic cryptography.

This book contains the revised selected papers of the Second Workshop on Real-Life Cryptographic Protocols and Standardization, RLCPS 2011, and the Second Workshop on Ethics in Computer Security Research, WECSR 2011, held in conjunction with the 15th International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security, FC 2010, in Rodney Bay, St. Lucia, in February/March 2011. The 16 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers cover topics ranging from anonymity and privacy, authentication and identification, biometrics, commercial cryptographic, digital cash and payment systems, infrastructure design, management and operations, to security economics and trust management.