A Secure and Trustful E-Ordering Architecture (TOES) for Small and Medium Size Enterprises (SMEs)

A recent European Union (EU) Directive which comes into force in 2008 could have potentially unforeseen and damaging effects on clinical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The scientific basis for the Directive is weak, and leans heavily on the ‘precautionary principle’ in deciding its restrictions, while having little or no substance to support them. In April 2004, the EU Parliament enacted the first of three Physical Agent Directives, in this instance dealing with occupational exposure to electromagnetic (EM) radiation (EU Directive, 2004). Legislation implementing this Directive has to be taken on board by all EU member countries – including the UK – by 30 April 2008.

The wide spread of using handheld devices offers an opportunity for mobile devices to be used as a universal payment method. However, some issues impede the widespread acceptance of mobile payment; for example: privacy protection, limited capability of mobile devices, and limited bandwidth of wireless networks. In ecommerce payment, Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol has been used to establish a secure channel between customers and merchants to secure the payment and the order information. SSL has some disadvantages regarding customer privacy that the customer payment information is revealed to the merchant. Secure Electronic Transaction (SET) has resolved SSL protocol disadvantages by dividing order message into: 1) order information which is revealed to merchant M, 2) payment information which is revealed to Payment Gateway (PG). Both SSL and SET assume the existence of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) where extensive computations are carried out. In mobile payment, the same protocols of ecommerce payment are used but their application is limited due to heavy computations over wireless and GSM networks. A Modified Secure Electronic Transaction (MSET) protocol is proposed to minimize the extensive computations of SET protocol through replacing time consuming public key encryption and decryption algorithms by symmetric key cryptography.

Security of electronic transaction over insecure communication channel is a challenging task that includes many critical areas as secure communication channel, strong data encryption technique and trusted third party to maintain the electronic database. The conventional methods of encryption in Secure Electronic Transaction can only maintain the data security. The confidential information of customer could be accessed by the unauthorized user for malicious purpose. Therefore, it is necessary to apply effective encryption methods to enhance data security as well as authentication of data communication. The multiple encryption technique provides sufficient security for electronic transactions over wireless network. In this research paper, the needs of multiple encryption technique in Secure Electronic Transaction are proposed to enhance the security of confidential data. This technique increases the data security in such a manner that unauthorized user can not access any part of information over wireless network as internet.

Security of Computer Networks

European Union (EU) approach towards violence against women and domestic violence is analyzed through interconnection with principles of gender equality and nondiscrimination. The combination of gender-based discrimination and gender inequality with other forms of discrimination (economic, political, etc.) very often result in specific forms of violence against women. EU acceded the Istanbul Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence of the Council of Europe in June 2023, which was spiritus movens for the adoption of the new EU Directive in this field. Achievements and shortcomings of this Directive are presented, as well as its significance within existing relevant EU primary and secondary legislation. New legislation criminalizes the following offences across the EU: female genital mutilation, forced marriage, non-consensual sharing of intimate images, cyber stalking, cyber harassment and cyber incitement to hatred or violence. However, criminalization of rape is lacking due to the absence of agreement of the constitutional element of sexual consent. Instead, prevention of rape and raising awareness of the importance of central role of consent are included. Taking into account the problem of secondary victimization, the Directive regulates rules on the measures of assistance and protection to victims that are to be secured by Member States, who are obliged to implement Directive in three years period. Directive gains special significance when taking into account relevant official data on violence against women in the EU. This Directive is to be considered the step forward in the direction of realization of gender equality de facto.

PurposeThis paper aims to investigate how firms disclose the presentation and content of business model (BM) information in corporate reports to manage their legitimacy in response to European Directive 2014/95.Design/methodology/approachLegitimacy theory is used to identify disclosure strategies pursued by firms in reaction to the new regulation. To understand how firms adopt these strategic responses, semiotic analysis is applied to a sample of European companies’ reports through Crowther’s (2012) framework, which is based on a mechanism of binary oppositions.FindingsHalf of the sample strategically choose to comply with the European Union (EU) Directive regarding BM information through the use of non-accounting language, figures, and diagrams. Other firms did not disclose any substantive information but managed the impression of compliance with the regulation, while the remainder of the sample dismissed the regulation altogether.Research limitations/implicationsThis study demonstrates how organisations use the disclosure of BM information in their corporate reports to control their legitimacy. The results support the idea that firms can acquire legitimacy by complying with the law or giving the impression of compliance with the regulation. This study provides evidence on the first-time adoption of the EU Directive, and therefore, future research can enlarge the sample and conduct the analysis over a broader time frame.Practical implicationsA more precise indication of the EU Directive regarding “where” firms should report BM information, “how” the description of a BM should refer to the environmental, social, governance (ESG) factors, and a set of performance measures to track the evolution of a company’s BM overtime is needed.Originality/valueWhile there has been a notable amount of research that has applied content analysis methodologies to investigate the thematic and syntactic aspects of BM disclosure in corporate reports, only a few studies have investigated BM disclosures in relation to the EU Directive. Furthermore, the application of semiotic analysis extends beyond traditional content analysis methodologies because it considers the structure of the story at many levels, thus developing a more complete textual picture of how BMs are described, allowing an analysis of the reasons behind the disclosure strategies pursued by firms.

The certificate authority (CA) is the central trust point in a public key infrastructure (PKI). Great care should be taken by users when they make a decision to trust a CA. Unfortunately, the average user will rely on the software to provide an appropriate security warning when something has gone wrong and therefore may not give much thought to the decision when performing such a security operation. The updating of a CA certificate is an issue that needs to be accomplished in a secure manner with little or no intervention by a user. Techniques are now in use that can allow for update of a CA's certificate. The Secure Electronic Transaction's (SET) root certificate update method is just one example, but in a specialized case. This paper discusses a practical solution that potentially any CA could use to provide a secure in-band update of a CA's X.509 v3 certificate into a user's personal security environment (PSE). A method is also discussed that Java programmers can use for update of self-signed X.509 v1 personal certificates in Java keystores as well.

SET (Secure Electronic Transactions) is a credit payment protocol on the Internet. The SET specification has open parts in order to flexibly cope with various users' business requirements. Security requirements are also a kind of business requirements. Due to such open parts of the SET specification, the currently provided compliance is not sufficient for assuring interoperability, though this test can verify whether the implementation of products complies with the SET specification. However, the ideal is not practical. Thus, an informal but practical validation called a step-wise prototyping method, is proposed to solve these problems through prototyping for various business applications. This method can validate the interoperability of products complying with the SET specification, or it can validate the SET specification itself, through a supplementary compliance test. As a conclusion, the validation of business protocols on the Internet, such as SET, whose specification is frequently revised and has a large degree of open parts, has a serious problem which needs to be solved. Our proposed method can give a solution to that problem.

In this Issue

ABSTRACTThis article contributes to the study of the preliminary reference procedure and the literature on the decentralized enforcement of European Union (EU) law through national courts. Drawing on the ‘compliance pull’ explanation for why national courts submit preliminary references to the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ), it suggests that a greater need to clarify ‘the validity and interpretation’ of one act compared to another is associated with variation in Article 267 submissions. Drawing on a sample of 1,300 national court decisions on EU directives with variation in Article 267 Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) submissions, this article finds that disputes relating to directives leaving more room for manoeuvre in implementation (‘delegation’) and relating to more complex regulatory issues (‘information intensity’) are more likely to be referred to the ECJ for interpretation. It argues that neglecting the ‘compliance pull’ explanations has consequences for how we conceptualize ‘decentralized enforcement’.

Does the new European Union air quality directive really protect health? A nationwide case study in Spain.

European Union (EU) law is known for its strong emphasis on effectivity and more generally for its instrumental character. This is not foreign even to European criminal law, a feature which creates some tension between the EU criminal law and criminal law in the national setting. EU Framework Decisions and Directives often require the Member States to criminalize certain forms of conduct with sanctions that are ‘Effective, Dissuasive and Proportionate’. In this article, I try to show that it would be timely to look at EU criminal law from an alternative point of view, as a more mature law. I call this a legitimacy-based approach. Such a reading would ease some of these tensions. It would also be helpful in developing a criminal policy for the EU, a policy which would be realistic and pragmatic. And it would be easier to look at EU criminal law from the point of view of justice. In order to get there, we need to see where the (current) narrow deterrence argument gets is wrong or one-sided. Some social theory is needed in order to make the point.

This technical report of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) presents guidance to reporting European Union (EU) Member Statesand non-Member States in data transmission using extensible markup language (XML) data transfer covering the reporting of isolate-based quantitative antimicrobial resistance data, as well as reporting of prevalence data on zoonoses and food-borne contaminants, food-borne outbreak data, animal population data and disease status data.For data collection purposes, EFSA has created the Data Collection Framework (DCF)application. The present report provides data dictionaries to guide the reporting ofinformation deriving from 2019 under the framework of Directive 2003/99/EC, Regulation (EU) 1375/2015, Regulation (EU) 854/2004 and Commission Implementing Decision 2013/652/EC.The objective is to explain in detail the individual data elements that are included in the EFSA data models to be used for XML data transmission through the DCF. In particular, the data elements to be reported are explained, including information about the data type, a reference to the list of allowed terms and any additional business rule or requirement that may apply.

ABSTRACTIn this article we focus on compliance with European Union (EU) directives in the context of multilevel governance. Policies specified by EU directives move through different decision-making stages before they are implemented. We integrate these decision-making stages and actors in a game-theoretical model aiming to explain implementation in the EU setting. Practice and organizational literature findings already indicate that in this setting formal and informal policies can differ considerably. Our model shows that such a divergence is the result of the interactions of three sets of actors at different levels. We illustrate the main findings of our model with cases of transposition and implementation of the EU rules regarding cultural heritage in the European Union. Based on our analysis, we suggest that EU policy implementation is best understood as a patchwork of domestic processes in which implementing actors affect outcomes within limits set by national and European decision-makers.

This paper presents the results of Work Package (WP) no. 10 of project Mechanisms for Assessing the Risk of Crime (MARC) consisting of a pilot study to test the Crime Risk Assessment Mechanism (CRAM) on European Union (EU) public procurement legislation. The research scope was restricted to Directive 2004/18/EC adopted by the European Parliament and the Council on 31 March 2004, which consolidates the previous directives in the same field. To this end, the research partners involved realised a survey of the literature, case study analysis and interviews, which highlighted the opportunities for economic/financial/organised crime inherent in specific items of EU public procurement legislation. Based on these inputs and sources, the researchers applied the CRAM to Directive 18/2004/EC and then developed a set of recommendations for better implementation of the methodology created in Project MARC. The exercise revealed some methodological difficulties with reference to the application of the CRAM in the pilot study. In particular, the following problematic aspects were revealed: the delta assessment (i.e. measurement of the differential in crime risk between the new and the old EU directives on procurement); the computational issues of the MARC formula (namely: elaboration of a synthetic Legislative Quality Index (LQI) and Market Vulnerability Index (MVI); reading LQI and MVI indicators not as separate entities but as linked together; risk that the same negative aspect of a legislative act may be double-counted under different indicators); the overlap between the MVI grids; and the content and wording of individual LQI/MVI indicators. The article concludes with a list of suggestions on how to repair these methodological shortcomings of the CRAM.