Virtualization has been used in computer servers for a long time as a means to improve utilization, isolation and management. In recent years, embedded devices have become more powerful, increasingly connected and able to run applications on open source commodity operating systems. It only seems natural to apply these virtualization techniques on embedded systems, but with another objective. In computer servers, the main goal was to share the powerful computers with multiple guests to maximize utilization. In embedded systems the needs are different. Instead of utilization, virtualization can be used to support and increase security by providing isolation and multiple secure execution environments for its guests. This thesis presents the design and implementation of a security application, and demonstrates how a thin software virtualization layer developed by SICS can be used to increase the security for a single FreeRTOS guest on an ARM platform. In addition to this, the thin hypervisor was also analyzed for improvements in respect to footprint and overall performance. The selected improvements were then applied and verified with profiling tools and benchmark tests. Our results show that a thin hypervisor can be a very flexible and efficient software solution to provide a secure and isolated execution environment for security critical applications. The applied optimizations reduced the footprint of the hypervisor by over 52%, while keeping the performance overhead at a manageable level.

Virtualization has grown increasingly popular, thanks to its benefits of isolation, management, and utilization, supported by hardware advances. It is also receiving attention for its potential to support security, through hypervisor-based services and advanced protections supplied to guests. Today, virtualization is even making inroads in the embedded space, and embedded systems, with their security needs, have already started to benefit from virtualization’s security potential. In this thesis, we investigate the possibilities for thin hypervisor-based security on embedded platforms. In addition to significant background study, we present implementation of a low-footprint, thin hypervisor capable of providing security protections to a single FreeRTOS guest kernel on ARM. Backed by performance test results, our hypervisor provides security to a formerly unsecured kernel with minimal performance overhead, and represents a first step in a greater research effort into the security advantages and possibilities of embedded thin hypervisors. Our results show that thin hypervisors are both possible and beneficial even on limited embedded systems, and sets the stage for more advanced investigations, implementations, and security applications in the future. / SVAMP

This thesis aims to introduce new methods within the field of experience design, an emergent interdisciplinary design discipline, using these methods as tools for debate and for the communication of new design concepts. An important part of the methods come from trendspotting practice and future studies methodology. The backbone of the final project is a “meta-method” which incorporates common methods surveyed so far: the “for/from” method. The first part of the “for/from” method is about designing prototypes and creating fictional narratives to project current trends into the future, the second part is perhaps less structured, but more ambitious, carrying fictional futures to the daily lives, to test and evaluate the scenarios created. Staging experiments and experiences around these proposed methodologies and testing the concepts through workshops forms the core of the proposed design practice. Since the domain of futures thinking is not populated by designers, it is of special importance to me as how designers might find a place in such interdisciplinary teams and how the organizational levels of these so-called complex experiential structures could allow designers to participate. I argue that experience designers not only design customer experiences to please and aestheticize products but they have the power to change people’s (rather than customers’) opinions, using the same tools the field of marketing and exhibition design offers them. / SWITCH!

In recent times, there has been a significant growth in the number of Internet users, resulting in an increased demand for different types and amounts of content. As content distribution over the Internet has become a key issue, one proposal is that the Internet architecture could evolve to a more ``Information-Centric'' paradigm instead of the currently designed ``Host-Centric'' paradigm. In the host-based architecture, the data is often restricted to a location and will become unavailable if the host holding the data (or network connection) becomes unreachable. With the Information-centric data approach, the requestor requests data and receives it regardless of where the data actually originated from. Hence, the focus moves from ``where'' to ``what'' one is interested in. The heterogeneity of access methods and devices makes this type of approach even more appealing, especially when caching of data at intermediate points can be achieved. The prototype developed in the thesis builds an important part of the Information-Centric vision, that is a receiver-driven transport protocol. This is in contrast to the host-centric transport protocols which are always source driven. The advantage of having the receiver driven feature is to allow for multiple senders or receivers of the same data. That is, one receiver may ask more than one holder to send different pieces of the same file. We have implemented, simulated and assessed the performance of the proposed protocol, hereby called NetInf TP. Since the protocol may have to co-exist with existing sender driven TCP implementations for some time, we have looked at the inter-operation of NetInf TP with TCP variants from both qualitative and quantitative perspectives. / CNS

Sustainable ways of living

The new generation of Wireless Sensor Networks, that is known as the Internet of Things enables the direct connection of physical objects to the Internet using microcontrollers. In most cases these microcontrollers have very limited computational resources. The global connectivity provides great opportunities for data collection and analysis as well as for interaction of objects that cannot be connected to the same local area network. Many of application scenarios have high requirements to security and privacy of transmitted data. At the same time security solutions that are utilized for general purpose computers are not always applicable for constrained devices. That leaves a room for new solutions that takes into account the technological aspects of the Internet of Things. In this thesis we investigate the access control solution for the IETF standard draft Constrained Application Protocol, using the Datagram Transport Layer Security protocol for transport security. We use the centralized approach to save access control information in the framework. Since the public key cryptography operations might be computationally too expensive for constrained devices we build our solution based on symmetric cryptography. Evaluation results show that the access control framework increases computational effort of the handshake by 6.0%, increases the code footprint of the Datagram Transport Layer Security implementation by 7.9% and has no effect on the overall handshake time. Our novel protocol is not vulnerable to Denial of Service or Drain Battery Attack. / Thesis supervised by Shahid Raza (shahid@sics.se) and Ludwig Seitz (ludwig@sics.se)

No description available.

HITS, 4707

Controller-Pilot Data Link Communication, a technology that has been introduced to help offload the congested, previously used voice communication in larger airports, has in recent years started being questioned on its sufficiency in security. As the traffic load in air traffic communication keeps demanding more reliable and secure systems, we will in this thesis look at how widely CPDLC is actually used in practice in Europe. By using the newly introduced technology in software defined radios, we show that it is possible to capture and decode CPDLC messages to readable plain text. We furthermore discuss which type of attacks that could be possible with information retrieved from CPDLC communication.

Instead of developing the same mobile application multiple times for different platforms, Androidand iOS, there are frameworks which allow the developer to deploy an application to severalplatforms using the same code base. One of these frameworks is React Native, a JavaScriptframework for developing mobile applications for both Android and iOS. Native Androidapplications are developed using Java or Kotlin. This paper evaluates React Native bycomparing it to an Android application written in Java. The evaluation is done by developing anapplication in each of the two technologies and comparing performance. The performance isevaluated by measuring frame rate during an animation and the average time to solvecomputational tasks. To get accurate measurements a tool called Systrace is used. The resultsshow that for graphical animations, applications developed using React Native have similarperformance as natively developed Android applications. At the same time, React Native is notvery good at pure computational tasks where natively developed Android applications performbetter