This thesis discusses how the education in the Master of Engineering program can change to become more into line for the students needs, especially for the women, both directly in the education situation and later in their occupational roles. This is done using a gender perspective. Both the education and the occupation today is characterised by masculine norms and values. The education lacks gender perspective and is created by men, for men. The thesis gives concrete proposals on how to change two existing courses to better fit the students. Some of the most important changes are to make the goals of the courses more accessible and visible for the students, make sure that both men and women occurs in teaching positions and have course literature written by women as well as men.

Nowadays Wireless LAN is playing a more and more important role in network systems. After 1999, in which the IEEE organization published its Wireless Local Network standard 802.11[1], many people saw the advantages of the standard but also the lack of support for multimedia streaming. A lot of research work has been done on the proposed IEEE 802.11e standard draft during the past 4 years. It is supposed to be able to fully support Quality of Service. The final version will be published early in 2004. In my thesis, I propose two possible methods to improve the performance of service differentiation in the MAC layer. The first one is calledPCWA (Practical Contention Window Adjustment). It is a method with which the station finds a best size of its contention window when running the EDCF (Enhanced Distributed Coordination Function) access method. It helps to improve the total system throughput, the jitter and the delay of traffics with different priorities. The second method is called AIPM (Adaptive Initiative Polling Machine). It uses the polling mechanism for differential service, intelligently arranging the polling time to reduce the delay as much as possible, achieving large improvement in performance. This method significantly increases the total system throughput, while the delay and jitter of the traffics are very much small in comparison to EDCF.

Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) arises as a new standard of establishing and releasing connections for vast variety of multimedia applications. The protocol may be used for voice calls, video calls, video conferencing, gaming and many more. The 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) suggests SIP as the signalling solution for 3rd generation telephony. Thereby, this purely IP-centric protocol appears as a promising alternative to older signalling systems such as H.323, SS7 or analog signals in PSTN. In contrast to them, SIP does not focus on communication with PSTN network. It is more similar to HTTP than to any of the mentioned protocols. The main standardisation body behind Session Initiation Protocol is The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The most recent paper published on SIP is RFC 3261 [5]. Moreover, there are working groups within IETF that publish suggestions and extensions to the main standard. One of those extensions is “Caller Preferences for the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)” [1]. This document describes a set of new rules that allow a caller to express preferences about request handling in servers. They give ability to select which Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI) a request gets routed to, and to specify certain request handling directives in proxies and redirect servers. It does so by defining three new request header fields, Accept-Contact, Reject-Contact, and Request-Disposition, which specify the caller preferences. [1]. The aim of this project is to extend the existing software with caller preferences and evaluate the new functionality.

In the age of a networking revolution, when the Internet has changed not only the way we see computing, but also the whole society, we constantly face new challenges in the area of user verification. It is often the case that the login-id password pair does not provide a sufficient level of security. Other, more sophisticated techniques are used: one-time passwords, smart cards or biometric identity verification. The biometric approach is considered to be one of the most secure ways of authentication. On the other hand, many biometric methods require additional hardware in order to sample the corresponding biometric feature, which increases the costs and the complexity of implementation. There is however one biometric technique which does not demand any additional hardware – user identification based on keyboard statistics. This thesis is focused on this way of authentication. The keyboard statistics approach is based on the user’s unique typing rhythm. Not only what the user types, but also how she/he types is important. This report describes the statistical analysis of typing samples which were collected from 20 volunteers, as well as the implementation and testing of the identity verification system, which uses the characteristics examined in the experimental stage.

Digital television broadcasters use conditional access (CA) systems to protect some of their services from being viewed by people not subscribing for these services. A manufacturer of digital television receivers develops applications to handle the CA systems that the receiver shall support. A problem for the application developer is that a CA application developed for one specific CA system is usually not reusable for other CA systems because of the differences between CA systems. The CA systems are different in both their application programming interfaces (API) as well as the types of functionality that they support. This master thesis presents a study of three APIs from different CA systems. The possibilities of defining a new CA API that supports all the functionality that is provided by existing CA APIs while still being as similar as possible to these existing APIs are investigated. The conclusion from the study is that it is not possible to define this new CA API because the studied CA systems are so different and only small parts of the provided functionality are shared between them.

This thesis covers the issue of securing ad hoc networks. Such networks exhibit a number of characteristics that make such a task challenging. One of the major challenges is that ad hoc networks typically lack a fixed infrastructure both in form of physical infrastructure such as routers, servers and stable communication links and in the form of an organizational or administrative infrastructure. Another difficulty lies in the highly dynamic nature of ad hoc networks since new nodes can join and leave the network at any time. The major problem in providing security services in such infrastructure less networks is how to manage the cryptographic keys that are needed. In order to design practical and efficient key management systems it is necessary to understand the characteristics of ad hoc networks and why traditional key management systems cannot be used. These issues are covered and the thesis also provides a summary of those key management solutions that have been proposed in the research literature so far.

One important issue faced by companies is to secure their information and resources from intrusions. For accessing a resource almost every system uses the approach of assigning a unique username and a password to all legitimate users. This approach has a major drawback. If an intruder gets the above information then he can become a big threat for the company and its resources. To strengthen the computer security there are several biometric methods for identity verification which are based on the human body’s unique characteristics and behavior including fingerprints, face recognition, retina scan and signatures. However most of these techniques are expensive and requires the installation of additional hardware. This thesis focuses on keystroke dynamics as an identity verifier, which are based on the user’s unique habitual typing rhythm. This technique is not just looking for what the user types but also how he types. This method does not require additional hardware to be installed and are therefore rather inexpensive to implement. This thesis will discuss how identity verification through keystroke characteristics can be made, what have been done in this area and give advantages and disadvantages of the technique.

Effektiv hantering av den växande mängden data i dagens IT-samhälle är ett ständigt återkommande problem. Lösningar som innebär att information med krav till snabb åtkomst dubbellagras på flera olika ställen, är bara en av anledningarna till nytänkandet "katalogtjänster''. Eftersom det länge inte funnits några fasta standarder för ett sådant protokoll har olika företag utvecklat sina egna lösningar. Detta innebär naturligt att det blir problem när man vill få olika katalogtjänster utvecklade för olika syften att samarbeta. Protokollet som är tänkt att lösa detta är LDAP (Lightweight directory Access Protocol). Detta arbete behandlar hur man bygger ett centraliserat autentiseringssystem med hjälp av LDAP. Fördelarna med LDAP framför traditionella metoder som NIS/NIS+ diskuteras, samt hur man kan knyta ihop ett nätverk med både Windows- och Linuxdatorer, där informationen om användare och rättigheter finns lagrade centralt i en LDAP-baserad katalogtjänst. Generella säkerhetsbegrepp kring autentisering tas upp, samt vad det egentligen är man behöver skydda vid autentisering och kommunikation via ett nätverk.

The company Roxen Internet Software have an implementation of the secure network protocol SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) which is used in their web server product. This report describes the upgrading of that implementation to the TLS1.0 (Transport Layer Security) standard. It also describes a performance investigation of the SSL/TLS support in the Roxen WebServer and compares it with other common web servers. The initial setup time for the secure SSL/TLS connection was found to be very long in the Roxen Webserver compared to its competitors. The main bottleneck, in the Roxen implementation, was found to be the modular exponentiation that is the core of the RSA decryption algorithm. One suggested improvement is to upgrade the bignumber numerical package used in Roxen WebServer, GMP (The GNU Multiple Precision arithmetic library) from version 2.0 to version 4.0. The newer version of the bignumber package have been measured to have considerably better performance in its modular exponentation operation.

The aim of this report is to discuss computer security in handheld computers and to find out the appropriate security level that must be implemented to be able to use handheld computers within the Swedish healthcare system. Most healthcare centers are using some kind of electronic journals for their patient´s data today, but there are still a number of clinics that are usingthe old paper-system. On a few places in Sweden the use of handheld computers at the clinics has already started, but in the United States the use of handheld computers in the medical area is already widespread and from this we can see a lot of different situations where it is useful and effective to work with handheld computers. The security demands on patient´s journals are high and regulated in both Swedish law and regulations from the National Swedish Board of Health and Welfare. The law does not have any substantial demands, but states that there should be an adequate security level based on the nature of the information and the costs. The conclusions of this report is that this level of security can be achieved in handheld computers if additional software is installed and used in combination with the security features in the operating system. It is also necessary to have a good method for user identification that is adjusted to fit the situation in the clinic.