Sunday, January 26, 2020

Development of Cryptography Studies

Development of Cryptography Studies 0.1 Abstract This report is an overview of some structures that have heavily influence the course and study of Cryptography the last decades. Initially, we will analyse the structure of some important ciphers such as DES, 3DES and AES by underlying some dark and complicated points and emphasizing the critical  functions called S-boxes. We will then expand of some basic attributes of these block ciphers, for example the running time of them and their hardware and software performance. Finally, we will focus on a highly important aspect of these cryptosystems, security by exploring some of the most significant attacks that have been discovered against them. The paper is concluded with a presentation of the most important results of our investigation. 1 Introduction Cryptography has a very rich history, rooted back in the ancient years. Even Greeks of classical times have demonstrated understanding of ciphers, with the example of Herodotus to be the most well known, who tattooed a message to his slave head on a slaves shaved head and hide it under his regrown hair. Before the modern era, cryptography had an absolute target the achievement of confidentiality of a message. The most crucial years for cryptography were undoubtedly the last century. The decisive step was an investigation of Claude Shannon, the father of information security. In his seminar at 1949, Shannon analysed and illustrated block ciphers and suggest that, if they are combined with some operations that can provide the whole cipher with permutation and substitution, they should be a reasonable option. A block cipher, is an encryption scheme that belongs in the branch of Cryptography that is called symmetric-key Cryptography. This name is justified by the fact that the parties th at are involved in the communication through the cipher use the same secret key. Later designed as iterated product ciphers, block ciphers are deterministic algorithms that operate on fixed length groups of bits, called blocks. The major attribute for a block cipher is that the length of the input, called plaintext, and the length of the output, called ciphertext, is always the same. They take as an input a key of k-bits length and the this key is expanded to many different keys following a sequence of operations, the so called round keys. Typically, a block cipher is built by iteration, using a function called round function. In every round, the round function takes as an input the corresponding message and the round key and produces a new outcome which is oriented to be used in the next round. The final round will produce the ciphertext. Block ciphers have been widely used and dramatically influence the new era of humanity, and more importantly for commercial reasons in industry a nd banking. There is a remarkable variety of examples from block ciphers, although for the rest of this paper we will focus on the most famous examples that dominated the whole area of symmetric-key Cryptography in the new era. These are called DES, 3DES, AES. Blowfish has also attracted the attention since there isnt still any known vulnerability but it will remain outside of the scope of this report. 2 Analysis and Description 2.1 Data Encryption Standard (DES) Nowadays, DES is considered to be insecure, but it had a huge impact in the development of the symmetric-key cryptography for many decades after its invention. It has been designed back in 1976, when the government of the United States realized the overwhelming necessity of an algorithm that could effectively protect government data and safely used for buying products from the international markets. The most interesting difference of DES with its predecessor, Lucifer, which has been designed by Horst Fiestel, is that the key length and the block length has been reduced significantly. Nevertheless, the key length, especially, was from the time that DES was published, under heavy criticism and was actually badly broken in 1997 with the so-called exhaustive search attack. That means that a machine was able to search all the possible keys and find the correct one. DES has a very rich history of attacks and we will examine some of these attacks in more detail later in this paper. The core idea behind DES is the so-called Feistel Network, where a block cipher can built up with the use of some arbitrary functions f0,f1,fd : {0,1}n → {0,1}n. There is a wide variety of block ciphers that have a similar construction, although AES has a completely different construction. The critical point in these kinds of constructions is the structure of these functions, which can vary significantly. Abstractly speaking, the main target is to construct an invertible function F : {0,1}2n → {0,1}2n in order to able to decrypt the ciphertext. DES is basically a 16-round Fiestel network. More specifically, the input is exactly 64 bits, so R0 and L0 are 32 bits each. Obviously, from the diagram above, in every the half of the bits remains unchanged. The other half comes with a sequence of operations. Initially, as specified by the protocol, a permutation of the whole input takes place, followed by a 16-round Fiestel Network. Each function f0,f1,f16 : {0,1}16 → {0 ,1}16 that is used at each round is computed by using the corresponding subkey, fi(x) = F(ki,x) ,in order to make the decryption circuit feasible and manageable from a hardware perspective of view. This subkey is produced by the main key, in the following way: 56 bits are selected from the 64 bits that contains the key, the 56 bits are divided into two 28 bit halves and each half is treated afterwards separately. In every round, both halves are rotated form the left to the right by one or two bits and then 48 bits are selected, 24 from the left and 24 from the right to build the corresponding subkey. After these 16 rounds of the Fiestel network, there is one more permutation before the final output is computed. The following image describes the construction of the fi function. Initially, the input of 32-bits replicates 48-bits with some simple calculations and then the result is XOR with the 48-bits subkey. The 48-bits are splitted to 8 blocks of 6 bits and passed to the S-boxes. This is the most critical point of a block cipher and bad implementation of S-boxes can easily compromise security. A S-box is a function {0,1}6 → {0,1}4 and acts like a look-up table. The selection of these tables is of vital importance and has been a controversial matter for many years. It has been proved that linear S-boxes is definitely not an option. Even a partly linear S-box can run under some kind of attacks. After the implementation of all the S-boxes, a last permutation that maps the 32-bits around, takes place. The decryption circuit follows exactly the inverse procedure. Obviously, the encryption and decryption circuit are almost identical as the only actual difference is the order that the f1,f2,,fd functions are applied. This fact made DES very attractive to hardware developers because they had to implement just one algorithm for both procedures. 2.2 Triple Data Encryption Standard (3DES) As already mentioned, DES has been proved to be vulnerable under certain types of attacks so significant has been made in order to improve the security of DES. For this reason, DES has been replaced by 3DES, which was published in 1998 To begin with, let E : KXM → M be a block cipher and lets define the function 3E : K3 → M as 3E((k1,k2,k3),m) = E(k1,D(k2,E(k3,m))), where D denotes the decryption algorithm. Actually, there are three encryption steps. The main question that arises here is why the middle one is a decryption algorithm and not and encryption algorithm. The answer is simple; this would have lead to the implementation of a single DES, beacause the first and the second DES operations cancel out. will cancel the other. Obviously, the key-size, as it was intended, has been increased to 168-bits, as each of the keys is 56-bits. There are three options for keys; in the first key options all the keys are independent, in the second option k1andk2 are independent and k3 = k1 and in the third all three key are identical, k1 = k2 = k3. The third option is no longer recommended by the NIST( National Institute of Standards and Technology), the first key option is the strongest with a total number of 168 key bits as mentioned above, and the second option is stronger that simply implementing DES twice. 2.3 Why not double DES? 3DES is considered to be a secure block cipher. Nevertheless, a normal question is why 2DES in not an option, as it may not seem easy to beak by brute force with a key-length space 2112. A 2DES can be defined in the following way; 2E(k1,k2),m) = E(k1,E(k2,m)) with a key length 112 bits. This construction turns out to be completely insecure and the reason for this is the meet-in-the-middle attack. Basically, if an attacker has at his disposal an actual message and the corresponding ciphertext, which will be of the same length, he will try to find a pair of key (k1,k2) that E(k1,E(k2,M)) = C. If we apply at both parts of this equation the decryption algorithm, then we get the get E(k2,M) = D(k1,C). So, the attacker will try to figure out which is the appropriate pair of key in order to map the message M and ciphertext C at the same point this also justifies the name of the attack meet-in-themiddle. The attack is structured in two steps: Firstly, the attacker has to build up a table wi th all the 2112 keys and the corresponding encryptions and then sort this list, and secondly, for all possible key that belongs to {0,1}56, he calculates D(k,C) and he looks for a match at the previous table. Whenever he finds the first match, his goal has been achieved. The running time of this attack is 256log(256) + 256log(256) < 263, time that is much smaller than the time that is necessary for brute force attack. 2.4 Advanced Encryption Standard(AES) It is widely acceptable AES has been adopted by the U.S. government and nowadays is used worldwide. As DES was proved insecure and 3DES quite slow, the demand for a more effective encryption scheme grew rapidly and at 1997 NIST requested a new proposal. After some investigation, NIST chose Rijndael as AES at 2000, a cipher that was designed in Belgium. AES, unlikely to its predecessor, its not a Feistel Network. In contrast, it is called a substitution-permutation network because both actions of permutation and substitution take place. AES has a fixed block size of 128-bits, although the key length can vary, 128,192 or 256 bits. Additionally, in every round of AES all bits change while in every round of DES half of the bits remain unchanged. Generally, a substitution permutation networks initial input is operated with an XOR with the corresponding round subkey, then goes through a substitution layer where there are some blocks, configured depending on what the substitution table says and finally a permutation layer follows where all bits are permuted. This procedure is repeated many times until the final outcome is produced. All steps of a substitution permutation network must be reversible in order to be able to decrypt. Specifically for AES, the 128-bits, which are equal to 16-bytes, are handled with the help of a 4X4 matrix with ten repeated rounds to follow. Each element of this matrix is one byte. Each byte comes under the XOR operation with the corresponding round subkey, and then a function is applied in every round that consists of three steps: (1) The Sub-Bytes step, according to which all bytes are replaced with other coming from a look-up table, named Rijndael S-box. This S-box is associated with the Galois Field(28) which is considered to have goo properties. This is a critical operation for the overall structure, as it provides AES with non-linearity. (2) The Shift-Rows step, where the last three rows of the current state are moved some certain positions to the left while the first row remains stable and (3) the Mix-Columns step, where all the bytes of each column of the current state are combined under a linear transformation. The last two steps provide AES with diffusion, a vital property for a secure cipher according to which if we change one bit of the plaintext then almost half of the bits o f the ciphertext will change. It is also considerable that the step Mix-Columns is omitted at the last round of AES. Each subkey is produced by the main key with some kind of expansion similar to the DES. The key expansion is introduced with a number of operations named rotate, Rcon, and S-box and then follows an inner loop in key schedule before the final subkey is produced. 3 Comparison and Attacks 3.1 Running time A real concern about which algorithm is appropriate, especially for commercial use, is the effectiveness and its running time. In general, the larger the block size is, the faster is the algorithm, obviously because larger amount of data is encrypted in one round of operations. Similarly, the smaller the key size is, the faster is the encryption algorithm, because the less key bits are involved in the operations and thus the complexity of them is reduced. A series of experiments have taken place to verify which of the famous encryption algorithms, AES,DES,3DES. Most of these experiments implement these encryption algorithms in Java, although there are some others that used C, most of them at a machine of Pentium 2 or Pentium 4. At most of these experiments, the fastest of these algorithms has been proved to be DES, followed by AES and finally from the 3DES, as it is three times slower than DES. It obviously doesnt make sense to examine the running time of these block ciphers in compl ete isolation with the security that they provide although it is definitely a factor that must be taken into consideration. 3.2 Software and Hardware Implementation Another important aspect that must be examined is the performance of these block ciphers in combination with the available hardware. Again, a lot of study has been carried out and provide us with some clear evidence. In compact architecture, 3DES, DES and AES have displayed very similar performance. In contrast, in high-speed architecture, AES is considered to be almost 4-times than the 3DES and DES. This is happening due to a variety of reasons, amongst them there is no hardware support for DES in modern CPUs, when from the other side there is for AES in increasingly many CPUs, including most targeting servers; hence hardware DES is oà ¯Ã‚ ¬Ã¢â‚¬Å¾oaded to a distant IC, when AES is often in-core. Additionally, DES is often used in CBC mode which makes parallelization inevitable and processed in advance during encryption when AES is mainly used in CTR mode where the possibility of parallelization is available. Finally, DES, and its expansion 3DES is much slower in software than AES, obviously because it was designed back at 1976 before the 8086 processor was designed and uses a lot of bit operations that are not implemented suà ¯Ã‚ ¬Ã†â€™ciently in a processor with a word oriented instruction set. 3.3 Attacks on DES and 3DES As already mentioned earlier at this paper, 2DES has been collapsed from the meet-in-the-middle-attack. Simultaneously, DES, despite its contribution to the overall development of cryptography, has also been defeated by a quite popular attack named exhaustive search. Exhaustive search means that the attacker will search the whole key space and he will find the appropriate, which is unique, in suà ¯Ã‚ ¬Ã†â€™cient amount of time. There are some cases, even in the real world where the attacker can obtain some pairs (mi,ci), where m denotes a message and c the corresponding ciphertext. Under this small requirement, DES was badly broken. To be specific, a company named RSA, back at 1997 announced a problem with the name DES challenge. The company announced six ciphertexts and in parallel announced the first three actual messages and asked for the scientific community to search for the key and use it to obtain the other messages. The same year of the request the challenge had been solved. To go further, the rapid hardware  development was able to create a machine that find the key and solve the problem, equivalently crack DES, within less than one day at the year 1999 with exhaustive search, leading to the assumption that 56-bits length block ciphers should not be used any more. As DES is one of the most famous and controversial block ciphers, it is not entirely surprising that there is a variety of attacks developed against DES, some of them even faster than exhaustive search. Back at 1998, Kocher and Jun demonstrated a very innovative idea by making a side channel attack, introducing a new era for cryptography. Side channels attacks extract information from the physical implementation of the cipher. This type of attack was specifically against smart cards, and is based in power measurement. They actually measured precisely the running time of the smart cards and analysed the diagrams that they obtain from this measurement. In this way, they were able to learn wa s much time was consumed by in each operation from the smart card and find exactly the key. Nowadays, even smart cards are equipped with mechanisms that dont reveal any information of the power consumption there is an attack called differential power analysis, which can steal the secret key after running a lot of time the smart card. It should me mentioned that these attacks are quite general and not for smart cards. In addition, there is another type of a quite highly surprising class of attacks called fault attacks. In this occasion, the attacker can cause a malfunction to a mechanism, lets say to a smart card, for example by warming it up. If he manage to cause and recognise an error at the last round of DES he will be able to discover the secret key. The last attack that we would like to point out is the so called linear cryptanalysis. This is a generic attack and was introduced by Matsui at 1993 and is one of the most realistic, sophisticated and quick attacks on the DES. His a ttacks, and generally in linear cryptanalysis, one tries to find probalistic linear relations between the plaintext, the ciphertext and the secret key. He starts by examining linear relations at the S-boxes of one round and if he succeeds, he will use the to find out linear relations in one-round and then finally them iteratively to find multi-round relations. These relations from round to round are not independent. By combining all these linear relations, the attacker should be able to retrive the secret key. Matsui attack used 244 known plaintexts to find 13 bits of the secret key with a high probability . A similar method was applied to find another 13 bits and then for the remaining 30-bits he applied exhaustive search, he applied exhaustive search, reducing significantly the time that the initial exhaustive search demands. Today, linear cryptanalysis is considered to be, with some improvements, one of the most powerful attacks on DES. Although DES is considered to be faultless and no specific technical vulnerabilities has been found, a high level of linearity at the fifth box of DES has created the possibility for someone to generate this type of attack. Most of the previously referred attacks can also be implemented against 3DES, as the two block ciphers are obviously, highly related. To begin with, an exhaustive search is not suà ¯Ã‚ ¬Ã†â€™cient any more as the key space, if we use three totally independent keys, is huge, especially if we take into consideration the computational power that a strong mahine can demonstrate nowadays. The meet-in-the middle-attack can be applied in a very similar mode, as the attacker can still create a sorted table with the first implementation of DES between one element of the table and the implementation of twice the DES at the opposite direction. The time needed for this attack is 2112, which is considered to be a high level of security, as nowadays a satisfactory level of security against a certain attack is approximately 290, although is still faster in comparison with exhaustive search. Lately, a new attack against block ciphers has been displayed, mainly intended against 3DES and Blowfish and exploits well known kind of vulnerabilities like collision and birthday attacks. Since this is currently under examination and was published only this year, we are not going to expand more. Overall, till today there is not a known and widely acceptable attack that cracks 3DES in a reasonable amount of time. 3.4 Attacks on AES Rijndael has outplayed all other candidates suggested for the AES and so has been analysed quite a bit the last decade. A lot of attacks have been introduced although none of them has hurt AESs security significantly. To begin with, there is a lot of analysis around the meet-in-the-middle attack and some possible improvements of it over the last five years. Gilbert and Minier have proved a very interesting distinguishing property for the first four rounds of AES with the following proposition; lets consider a set of 256 plaintexts where the entry a11 takes all byte values between 0 and 255 exactly once over a given set of plaintexts and all other entries are equal to a constant. If we encrypt this set with three rounds of AES then the function that maps a11 to C11 is determind by 9 fixed 1-byte parameters. C11 denotes the byte values at row i, column j. This proposition was used by them to implement the same idea of the meet-in-the-middle attack. Some further investigation have shown that the number of the parameters, and specifically for 13 or 14 bytes, and this is able to be reduced so the number of the required plaintexts will be minimized. Another famous class of attacks are called cache attacks. Cache is a small part of high speed memory and it aims to keep the CPU as much busy as possible. The catch parameters influence the running time of an algorithm. Specifically, when an element of a data array is called, then we have two possible outcomes. Id the element lies n the cache memory,then the access is instant. In a different situation, the element must be accessed from the main memory. This operation will be executed in significantly different running times and reveal valuable information. We can separate this class of attacks into three families; cold start misses, which arise for the first reference of the data, capacity misses which the magnitude of the element is bigger than the size o the cache and the conflict misses, which may happen in the case of accessing recently accessed data. 4 Conclusion In this paper we examined the structure of popular block ciphers that heavily influenced the development of Cryptography, like DES,3DES and AES and we have compared them in means of running time and software and hardware implementation. We have also considered some basic attacks that have been applied on these cryptosystems. We come to the conclusion that AES is the most safe and practical block ciphers, and this is justified by the fact that is has been chosen for encryption at a series of important applications nowadays. IS it estimated that AES will fully replace 3DES until 2030. There is not any doubt that AES is the most practical and convenient cipher from a hardware and running time perspective. Nevertheless, further investigation must definitely be carried out to ensure the the safety of AES, especially under the increasing enhancement of the technological means, is guaranteed. Finally, the attack Sweet32 is a newly invented attack and must carefully be examined, mainly becau se it is really compromise 3DES security, countermeasures must be taken DES will fully replaced by AES. 5 References [1] Dan Boneh and Victor Shoup, A Graduate Course of Cryptography, August 2015. [2] Diaa Salama Abd Elminaam,Hatem Mohamed Abdual Kader and Mohiy Mohamed Hadhoud, Evaluating The Performance of Symmetric Encryption Algorithms, Higher Technological Institute 10th of Ramadan City, Egypt, (Received Feb. 16, 2009; revised and accepted May 12, 2009) [3] Aamer Nadeem, Dr M. Younus Javed, A Performance Comparison of Data Encryption Algorithms, Department of Computer Engineering, College of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering, National University of Sciences and Technology, Rawalpindi, Pakistan. [4] Akashi Satoh and Sumio Morioka, Hardware-Focused Performance Comparison for the Standard Block Ciphers AES, Camellia, and Triple-DES, Tokyo Research Laboratory IBM Japan Ltd. [5] Huseyin Demirci, Ihsan TaskÄ ±n, Mustafa Coban, and Adnan Baysal, Improved Meet-in-the-Middle Attacks on AES, 2011. [6] Daniel J. Bernstein, Cache-timing attacks on AES, Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science (M/C 249) The University of Illinois at Chicago, 2005. [7] Eran Tromer, Dag Arne Osvik and Adi Shamir, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 32 Vassar Street, G682, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA and Laboratory for Cryptologic Algorithms, Station 14,  ´Ecole Polytechnique F ´ed ´erale de Lausanne, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland Received 20 July 2007 and revised 25 June 2009. [8] Anne Canteaut, C ´edric Lauradoux and Andr ´e Seznec, Understanding cache attacks, April 2006. [9] Johannes Blomer and Volker Krummel, Analysis of countermeasures against access driven cache attacks on AES, Faculty of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and Mathematics University of Paderborn, Germany 2009. [10] Hamdan.O.Alanazi, B.B.Zaidan, A.A.Zaidan, Hamid A.Jalab, M.Shabbir and Y. Al-Nabhani, New Comparative Study Between DES, 3DES and AES within Nine Factors, Journal of Computing, Volume 2, Issue 3, March 2010. [11] Henri Gi lbert and Thomas Peyrin, Super-Sbox Cryptanalysis:Improved Attacks for AES-like Permutations, Orange Labs, France [12] Elisabeth Oswald, Stefan Mangard, Norbert Pramstaller and Vincent Rijmen, Institute for Applied Information Processing and Communciations (IAIK), Austria, 2005. [13] Kai Schramm, Gregor Leander, Patrick Felke and Christof Paar, A Collision-Attack on AES Combining Side Channel and Differential Attack, Horst Gortz Institute for IT Security, Germany 2005. [14] Alex Biryukov and Dmitry Khovratovich, Related-Key Cryptanalysis of the Full AES-192 and AES-256, University of Luxembourg 2011. [15] A Chosen-Plaintext Linear Attack on DES, Lars R. Knudsen and John Erik Mathiassen Department of Informatics, University of Bergen, N5020 Bergen, Norway, 2000. [16] Jawahar Thakur and Nagesh Kumar, DES, AES and Blowfish: Symmetric Key Cryptography, Algorithms Simulation Based Performance Analysis, International Journal of Emerging Technology and Advanced Engineering Website: www.ije tae.com (ISSN 2250-2459, Volume 1, Issue 2, December 2011) [17] Stefan Tillich and Christoph Herbst, Attacking State-of-the-Art Software Countermeasures A Case Study for AES, Institute for Applied Information Processing and Communications, Inffeldgasse 16a, A-8010 Graz, Austria

Saturday, January 18, 2020

Self Analysis Example

Name: Mark Anthony D. MendozaDate: April 20, 2013 Subject: Contemporary Management Theories: Self Analysis Part Ia. INTEREST 1. How do I like to spend my time? I really want to spend my time in doing worthwhile things. I work, study and join adventurous activities. Most importantly, I always find time to participate with our religious activities like our house to house preaching to share the good news about the kingdom of God Jehovah. 2. Do I enjoy working with people? Yes. I enjoy working with different kinds of people. Actually, I prefer working with a group rather than working alone. 3.Do I like to work with mechanical things? Yes. When I was in high school we were taught to do mechanical things like electrical applications, carpentry and troubleshooting appliances. During my free time, I usually do troubleshoot dysfunctional home appliances even though I am not that good at it. 4. Do I enjoy working with data? I do enjoy working with data most especially if it’s numerical or accounting related. 5. Am I a member of many Organizations? No. At present I am only a member of some organizations. 6. Do I enjoy physical activities? I am a very active person enjoying physical activities.I usually play games like table tennis, badminton and volleyball. I also join adventurous activities like mountain climbing. At least twice a year, we enjoy hiking for at most three days in the mountains of Kayapa and Ambaguio. 7. Do I like to read? I am not really that kind of person who is fond of reading. It usually depends on my mood but most of the time my retention is at most two hours. ABILITIES 1. Am I adept at analysis? I believe that I am not that adept regarding analytical matters. 2. Am I adept at working with computers? Yes. It is with the aid of the computer subjects integrated in our curriculum.It is also enhanced by the use of computer s at work. I became familiar with various applications and I was acquainted on how to operate them properly. 3. Do I have good verbal and written communication skills? I can also consider that my writing and speaking abilities are good. It is with the help of the subjects I teach in class. Through regular class discussion my speaking abilities are gradually improved. The many write ups, concept papers, case analyses that I have prepared also enhances my writing abilities. 4. What special talents do I have? I do not have any special talent. 5.At which abilities do I wish I were more adept? I wish I am more intellectually inclined with excellent writing and communication skills. PERSONALITY 1. What are my good and bad traits? Some of my good are the following. I have sense of helping the needy. I also know my responsibilities as a child, brother and as a person to others. I can also consider myself as cheerful. Some of my bad habits are the following. Sometimes, I am late going to work. I am also lazy in doing household chores. 2. Am I competitive? One of my mottos in life is â€Å"Always do your best† . I always do my best in everything I do.It may be academics, work or whatever it maybe. 3. Do I work well with others? I can assume that I work well with others. Basing on my present job most of my officemates, if not all, like to work with me. I can say that because I am easy to work with and I am always practicing flexibility. 4. Am I outspoken? I think so. Most of the time, I say things that I know is right. 5. Am I a leader or a follower? I can be a combination of both but most of the time I am a follower. I am an abiding individual. I usually follow orders as long as it is positive and not against my will. 6.Do I work quickly, or am I methodical? I am a fast worker; I easily find ways on how to get things done. Basing from the comments I have earned from my supervisor during my On-the-job training, she said that I am an accurate and fast worker. 7. Do I get along with others? I think I am. I have group of friends and I can go along with others easily. Again, basing on the comm ents of one of my supervisor from my evaluation, she said that â€Å"everybody in the office likes me†. 8. Am I ambitious? Yes I am. I am really ambitious in the sense that I want to achieve a lot of things in my life.But I think that my ambition is not just an ambition because everything I dream is accompanied with action. 9. Do I work well independently of others? I can also work well independently. This is very true when I make my reaction papers, concept papers and other individual reports. But I am fonder with working with a group. DESIRED JOB ENVIRONMENT 1. Am I willing to relocate? Why? Yes. If it is a requirement for the job to relocate I will be much willing to relocate. I know myself that I can easily adapt different kinds of working environment. Actually, I am also planning to work abroad and that requires relocation. 2.Do I have geographical preference? Why? Yes, I want to work in a place wherein the climate is good. If I would choose the location it would be some where in Europe. I have a preference over the geography of the place where I will work because it might be uncomfortable for me to stay in is some places and that makes me unproductive. 3. Would I mind traveling in my job? For me traveling as part of my job is not a problem. Actually, I do enjoy going to different places. It would be an addition to my experience while performing the task given to me. 4. Do I have to work for a large or nationally known firm to be satisfied?I prefer to work in large and known company. It is for the fact that it will not only offer greater financial help but greater opportunities for career advancement. 5. Must my job offer rapid promotion opportunities? Not necessarily. Even though most of the employees would want to be promoted, I would not consider it as my main stimulus. As long as I am happy with my job it would be good for me. Promotion would just be considered as an additional prize of enjoying my job. 6. If I could design my own job, what char acteristics would it have? I would like that I would be leading the financial aspects of the business.I would like to decide on financial matters, give reports on the standing of the business and share in the decision making. 7. How important is high initial salary for me? For me, high initial salary is not that important because I know that salary increase goes with experience and service. What is important is I like the job I will be doing. EDUCATION 1. How have my courses and extracurricular activities prepared me for a specific job? The courses we had during our undergraduate studies really helped us to be prepared for whatever career path we may go. It is due to these courses that we have been acquainted to different job scenarios.With the help of the On-the-job training, the theories we have learned in school were reinforced to make us fit with the job. 2. Which were my best subjects? My worst? If I am going to base it on the rating I earned. I would say my best subjects would be Physical Education because I got a very high grade. If it is based on learning, I would choose my accounting subjects because I really learned a lot. I consider Income taxation as my worst subject because I got the lowest grade among all the subjects I have taken. It was an irony because the subject is one of the subjects I have taught. . Is my GPA a good indication of my academic ability? Why? I do really believe that my GPA is an actual interpretation of my academic ability. It is because I am convinced that my GPA really shows what I did. 4. Do I aspire to a graduate degree? Before beginning my job? It is not that necessary for me. I got a job before I was being able to hold a degree. 5. Why did I choose my major? Actually, I do not have much good reasons why I choose accounting. I have chosen the field of accounting just because I loved numbers. PERSONAL GOALS 1. What are my short-term and long term goals? Why?My present goal is to be able to pass the CPA board examination. One of my long term goals would be the establishment of my own convenience store and I am the manager. 2. Am I career oriented, or do I have broader interest? I can say that I have broader interest with regards to the career I have chosen. I would not just stick for the fact that I am an accountant but to pursue my goal to become an entrepreneur. 3. What are my career goals? First, I want to pass the CPA board examination. Then work with an auditing company wherein I can travel not only locally but internationally.After gaining all the expertise I would like to run my own business. 4. What jobs are likely to help me achieve my goals? I think any jobs that are related to my degree would be an addition to the achievement of my goals. 5. What do I hope to be doing in 5 years? In 10 year? Five years from now I hope that I would be one of the most successful accountant and employee of a well-known company. And after five years, I hope that I would be managing my own business. 6. What do I want out of life? Poverty, suffering, sickness and death. I would like that every individual would be enjoying the gift of life God has given us.EXPERIENCE 1. What previous jobs have I held? What were my responsibilities in each job? I worked as an Accounts Receivable Analyst. I prepare an analysis of the accounts of every student and make necessary adjustments if errors are made. I was also the liaison office of Saint Mary’s University. I transact business with different banks and other governmental agencies. I prepare premium reports of employees. 2. What internships or co-op positions have held? What were my responsibilities? I have my internship at metro bank. I was assigned to compute and update the time deposits of depositors.I have also done clerical works like sorting of checks and counting cash. 3. What volunteer positions have I held? What were my responsibilities? When one of my officemate attended the review for the CPA board exam, I took over some of her work. I prepare bank reconciliation statements and prepare checks for disbursement. 4. Were any of my jobs or positions applicable to positions I may seeking? How? As an accounting major, I would be looking for job that is in line with my degree. My experience on my previous jobs will be an additional factor because I also learned a lot of things that I may use on my next job. 5.What did I like most about my previous jobs? I like the company of my officemates who are always there to support. I love the way our superior treated us. 6. If I had to do it over again, would I work in these jobs? Why? Yes, I really love the world of accounting. As long as I am still enjoying my field, I would be much willing to do it all over and over again. Part 1b. Leadership Lifeline A 1. What are the key experiences that shaped my present as leader? Being a good follower makes a good leader. All the theories I have learned and the teaching of my teachers during my undergraduate studies helped me to become a good leader.As a teacher, I have known how to management my class properly. Teach them how to be a good student and help them cope up with academic difficulties. I also make it sure that they have learned something about the subject I have taught them. I have also learned a lot of thing from the interaction from my students. 2. Who were the key influences that developed me into the kind of leader I am today? I would give the main credit to my parents who molded me to become a good person. Also with my teachers who shared their knowledge and expertise. My officemates who taught me understand the essence of work and camaraderie. . What are the key lessons I have learned about leadership? As stated above, I believe that a good leader must be a good follower. A leader should not be so autocratic but must listen to the ideas and needs of his team. 4. What was the most difficult leadership challenge that I have experienced as a leader? What was the impact of this challenge to me? The mos t difficult challenge was during my first year of teaching. It is very challenging because I don’t have any teaching experience yet and it was my first time, also for the fact that some of my students are older than me. I took the challenge positively.I prepared my lessons well before discussions. It is very fulfilling because I have received positive outcomes. 5. What have been my experiences in doing collaborative work as a leader? How were my experiences? It is really fun and interesting doing such an activity. I enjoy working with a group most especially on exchanging of ideas. This experience adds up to the confidence in doing successful activity. 6. From my story as a leader what is my purpose in life? As leader, I need to show good example to all the people. I need to exert more effort to be able to meet the expectations of those who believe in my abilities.MY LEADERSHIP LIFELINE B PEELING BACK THE ONION: WHAT IS MY AUTHENTIC SELF 1. My Values and Principles I have gro wn up with the Filipino values of love and respect, giving much importance to family. My principles in life are usually based from the bible. I follow the golden rule that is to do what is right to others so that others will also do the same. I also show genuine love to everyone as much as I can. 2. My strengths I consider my positive attitude toward others, work and life. In addition, I also consider my adept understanding with my chosen field of expertise and numerical reasoning. . My purpose One of my major purposes in life is to help others know to the Kingdom of God. I also may sure that my family would feel how much I care and love them. I am also here to share what I have and serve others. It may not be financially but my presence to them can make a difference. With regards to being a leader, service is what matters most. 4. My weaknesses I have low self-esteem and confidence. I don’t usually have the guts to do things on my own and show what I am really capable. I am always on doubt for myself. I have low regard with my abilities.I also find it difficult to say my opinions about different matters. 5. My talents I am somewhat inclined with numerical reasoning. I don’t really know my talents are. MY LEADERSHIP LIFELINE C What do my story and my authentic self as a leader say about my Worldview, Values, Talents and Purpose. 1. WORLDVIEW: How do you seek or look at the world? What does the world mean to you? I look at the world as a perfect place to explore and share what we have and what we are to others. It means that I need to appreciate all the precious things that are provided to us.The world is also a place where we can show the best we can be and contribute for its development. 2. VALUES: What principles you will never sacrifice? a. Honesty b. Faith c. Justice d. Equality e. Love 3. TALENTS: What are you naturally good at? What do you naturally enjoy to do, think and learn about? a. Numerical reasoning b. Dancing c. Playing sports d. H iking e. Preaching 4. PURPOSE: What is the purpose of your life? What issue, group or sector is involved on life message? One of my major purposes in life is to help others know to the Kingdom of God.I also may sure that my family would feel how much I care and love them. I am also here to share what I have and serve others. It may not be financially but my presence to them can make a difference. With regards to being a leader, service is what matters most. 5. ISSUE: How is your life purpose related to the central issues you are facing? One of the issues I am facing now is time management. As stated above, my major purpose in life is to preach the Kingdom of God but I am working full time so I am face with the dilemma on how to achieve that goal. Most often, I lack time to do all the things I really wanted to do. Part II. STRENGTHS |WEAKNESSES | |Sociable |Tardiness | |Adept in Computer applications |Low self-esteem | |Good reading and communication skills |Doubtful about my abili ties | |Responsible |Low self confidence | |Competitive |Lack of confidence to share opinions | |Fast worker | | |Adaptable | | |Career oriented | |

Friday, January 10, 2020

Is the Financial Crisis caused by inefficient financial data management or financial models or both? Essay

This question is posed at the conclusion of â€Å"As Securities Become More Complex Is Financial Data Management Becoming More Complex?† by Jeffrey Rooney.   This paper discusses OTC derivatives as an example of how the financial crisis escalated and Enterprise Data Management (EDM) as a financial data model that offers a solution to data problems faced by the industry. Based on Rooney’s presentation the financial crisis is a symptom of inefficient financial data management which is the result of intentional   use of poor financial models coupled with the intentional misuse of financial models. Poor financial data management has a cultural and technological basis.   The cultural component is the Chinese wall or siloed business unit structure which facilitates and operates on the intentional misuse of financial models for the purpose of preserving the identity and autonomy of independent business units.   The technological component includes other issues such as merger activities and â€Å"disparate legacy systems† (Rooney 2009, p.2)   which results in either use of poor financial models or provides no framework for effective financial models at all. The IBM-World Bank currency swap was structured with the goal of avoiding highly regulated capital markets and regulation by affected countries.   This was a $290 million transaction which paved the way for the creation of the now $700 trillion OTC derivative market.   (Rooney 2009, p.3) As a result of these inefficiencies a financial crisis has occurred in multiple sectors of the financial markets. The financial crisis is the result of the systematic use of poof financial models and inefficient data management strategies built around the primary goal of expanding the derivative market.  Ã‚   Avoiding regulation and   hiding the complexity of derivative transactions is a primary goal of, resulting in, the inefficient financial data management and financial models. Bibliography Rooney, J.   (Spring 2009) As Securities Become More Complex Is Financial Data Management Becoming More Complex?   FinTech Project. Polytechnic Institute of NYU Finance and Risk Engineering.

Thursday, January 2, 2020

Global Economy And Economic Variables - 1246 Words

1 COURSE PROJECT MG631 – GLOBAL ECONOMY How Global Economy and Economic Variables are affecting Global Operations of Apple Corporation 2 Executive Summary The macroeconomic discussi ons that Apple s success tends to be very curious things. Here we have a company that s been phenomenally successful, making products people love s and directly creating nearly 50,000 American jobs in doing so, criticised for not locating its manufa cturing operations in America, eve n as Americans complain about the working conditions of those doing the manufacture abroad: life in dormitories, 12 - hour sh ifts 6 days a week, and low pay . The utility of Apple, however, is that it does provide a framewo rk within which we can discuss the significant changes that have occurred across the global economy in recent decades. Apple s products are assembled in massive factory complexes in China, run by Foxxconn, which also handles the production of consumer elec tronics for many other large players in the industry. The success of Apple Corp can be traced to majorly to some of the economic conditions discussed in this report. In section 1, Apple was able to minimize labour cost in it production by setting up assembly plants in parts of Asia where labour are cheaper compare to the US. In section 2, economic of scale was discussed as the cost advantages exploited by expanding the scale of production in the long run. The effec t of this is to reduce long run average costs over a range of output. InShow MoreRelatedEssay on The Challanges Faced by the Coca-Cola Company1240 Words   |  5 Pagesmacroeconomic variables that indicate trends in the economy. A reduction in consumer confidence in the United States, resulting in lower product sales, has been offset by rising sales in overseas markets. 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