ASTRA is a project that aims at studying awareness systems that help people to feel in touch with family and friends even when they are away from their computers and the existing widespread tools of today (IM, skype, twitter,...) are not enough. In this context, this thesis aims at addressing the problem of Interruption management. The focus will be on the design and development of different interaction mechanisms to support the definition of interruption rules as needed in ASTRA. This will require the extension of the existing Interruption Manager as well as the development of suitable user interfaces, also considering physical interfaces when appropriate. A limited evaluation of the proposed solutions will be evaluated with users.

This project is a continuation of my specialization project which was focused on studying theoretical concepts related to case based reasoning method, rule based reasoning method and integration of them. The integration of rule-based and case-based reasoning methods has shown a substantial improvement with regards to performance over the individual methods. Verdande Technology As wants to try integrating the rule based reasoning method with an existing case based system. This project focuses on designing, implementing and testing of a demo system that demonstrates the development of a rule based reasoning component and integrating it with the existing case based system of Verdande Technology As.

In our everyday tasks context plays an important role, we act based on the information we have or based on what we can see, hear or feel about surrounding. Using this information about context we use to adapt ourselves and our behavior for example in class room we usually whisper when we want to communicate with other class fellow, but in cafeteria we talk normally. Due to the advancements in technology and mobile computing, we are now able to carry computers and smart phones with us, almost everywhere and use them as an alternative to desktop computers. Ubiquitous computing goes step further and refers to the world where computation is being weaved into every day object. In typical ubiquitous computing scenario many invisible computers interact with each other to help user in getting his task done. The ability of being carried easily, i.e. mobility and their presence almost everywhere make it necessary for computer systems, taking part in ubiquitous computing environment, context-aware. If computers can sense the environment they are being used in, they can help user in providing only relevant information, information at correct place and time and such systems can also adapt their behavior according to their surroundings. For example, if would be nice if our mobile phone automatically set to silent profile, whenever we are in class room or in a meeting room. Ubicollab is a platform for supporting collaboration and is a result of research work done in the areas of mobility and ubiquitous computing. Mobility and ubiquity being the inherent properties of UbiCollab, requires it to be aware of context just like another ubiquitous system. It will help UbiCollab applications to adapt their behavior as per surrounding and will enhance the experience of collaboration by using the resources nearby. I researched in the area of context-aware ubiquitous computing and used the results of my research to design and implement a solution for making UbiCollab context-aware. The proposed solution answers research problem related with context itself and different aspect of context. Context definition for UbiCollab has already been defined in work previously done; my solution addresses how to represent this contextual information in simple and effective manner, how to gather location information using different and heterogeneous sensors in understandable and standard format. The outcome of this work comprises of proposed context model, design and implementation of Space Manager for working with spaces, design and usage of flexible data store for storing space information and design and implementation of Location Service Manager for gathering location information using different location sensing technologies.

This project is a continuation of research work done by (Asif, 2009) which proposed an extended architecture of Mobile Student Information System (MSIS) to integrate the systems available for the students to provide student centric services on mobile devices. The architecture was developed by using Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to provide services for collaboration and communication among the students or between students and the teachers. The mobile services are built by integrating MSIS to Twitter, Feed based systems and NTNU email system. The services have the potential to provide students an experience of a virtual environment of class, project work and discussion groups anytime-anywhere. The project has been carried out in accordance with design-science research model over a number of implementation and evaluation iterations. A user-driven evaluation of the MSIS service has been conducted among a diverse group of NTNU students. The utility as well as the usability of the system were evaluated by applying observational and empirical evaluation methods in a real-world environment at the university. The usability test identified few issues with the initial design of services, and received feedback for enhancements. The Mobile Service Acceptance Model (MSAM) has been used to examine the factors that are influential for user adoption of mobile services in the light of this project. The MSAM instrument measures different facets of a mobile information service, such as the perceived usefulness, ease of use, and usage intention. Our findings confirm that the utility of the student centric mobile services are perceived as high, and students would likely benefit from such kind of services. There is no doubt about the great potential for a service like MSIS and it is believed to be a useful addition to the existing systems.

Security engineering is one of the important concerns during system development. It should be addressed throughout the whole system development process; however in many cases it is often dealt only during system development and maintenance. There are several security modeling languages (e.g, Misuse case, Secure Tropos) that help dealing with security risk management at the requirements stage. In this thesis, we are focusing on the modeling languages (e.g. Mal activity diagrams and SecureUML) that are used to design the system. More specifically we investigate how these languages support information systems security risks management (ISSRM). The outcome of this work is an alignment table between the Mal activity diagrams and SecureUML language constructs to the ISSRM domain model concepts. We ground our analysis and validate the received results on the number of illustrative examples. We hope that our results will help developers to understand how they can consider security risks at the system design stage. In addition we open the way for the interoperability between different modeling languages that are analysed using the same conceptual background, thus, potentially leading to the transformation between these modeling approaches.

towards silos and smokestacks takes its name from the Silos and Smokestacks Heritage Area. In 1996, the northeast third of Iowa became a federally designated heritage area to pass on the story of American agriculture to younger generations. I spent much of my childhood growing up in Iowa. On my many trips through the state, two contrary aspects in the surrounding landscape caught my fascination. First, there are the vast cornfields that expand outwards for miles fading off beyond the horizon. Second, this countryside is home to countless grain silos and billowing smokestacks of small Midwestern cities. These monoliths can be seen miles away like small islands within Iowa’s rolling agricultural oceans. As I drew closer to these structures, they would slowly grow into colossal pillars giving a vertical, albeit fleeting, dimension to the scenery before disappearing once again into the distance. This piece is an attempt to juxtapose this sense of vastness and the monoliths that interrupt the sprawling “amber waves of grain” through the use of spatial aspects and ever expanding register.

GSM network capable of connecting to any operator providing SIP trunk has beenconstructed to serve as a target for controlled experiment on DoS attacks againstGSM. The usage of this network as a tool to perform DoS attack against mobilephones was also investigated and documented.Open source implementation of testing tool to check DoS resilience of any GSMbase station against RACH flood attack was developed as part of this thesis.Additionally, the analysis of the GSM flaws which opened the possibility for DoSattacks, and the analysis of potential countermeasures is presented.

Typical authentication systems provide a method to allow registered users access to protected resources after the user successfully authenticates. A user successfully authenticates by proving his or her valid identity if he or she is a registered user. During a typical authentication process, the authentication server can directly or indirectly learn the actual identity of the user who authenticates. However, the user might not want any one to know the actual identity of the user, while still able to authenticate. This problem of user's anonymous authentication is the focus of this thesis project. This thesis project provides a solution for user's anonymous authentication using Secure Multi-party Computation (SMPC). In SMPC, the user information is distributed among the authentication servers, using a secret sharing scheme, in such a way that none of the authentication server individually possesses all the information of a user. However, these authentication servers can validate the user using some SMPC arithmetic operations. This thesis project provides a model for anonymous authentication and couples this anonymous authentication system with the Open Authentication Protocol (OAuth) to allow the user access to protected resources on the server. The model is explained using UML collaborations and SDL state transition diagrams. A analysis of the model is provided to ensure the security of the proposed system. A skeleton of the proposed model is provided which needs to be completed with appropriate code to realize the functionalities. This thesis project also provides an implementation of a simplified prototype which represents the core of the proposed model for anonymous authentication.

Cloud Computing is a new computing model, and its security aspects require special considerations. New characteristics of the cloud model have introduced new security challenges, and made some of the existing security techniques incompatible. Moreover, existing cloud environments are closed, operated by commercial providers, and their security mechanisms are proprietary as well as confidential. In other words, there is not much chance of observing how a real cloud environment is working, and how their providers adapt security measures to the new model.Therefore, we have chosen an open source cloud platform to build our own cloud environment. The OpenStack cloud software met our requirements, but it was not mature enough. We have done a deep analysis of this platform, identified potential attack targets in it, and discuss impacts of a successful attack.In order to secure our environment, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) incident handling guideline has been applied to the cloud model, and corresponding actions for each phase has been performed. To complete our study, we have proposed a set of cloud specific approaches that fulfill the incident handling requirements. These approaches address challenges identified in the guideline adaptation process. Additionally, we have studied the feasibility and compatibility of each approach against our deployed environment.Additionally, we also have submitted a paper to IEEE CloudCom 2011 conference, based on my thesis. A draft version of the paper is included in Appendix A.

In recent years, technologies in the area of ubiquitous computing have experienced a great advancement. This has resulted in a wide-spread use of services in order to improve the quality of our daily life. For example, a person with a mobile device can use the services available in the ubiquitous computing environment to plan and execute his or her travel, to connect to family and friends, to perform his or her researches, even to manage his or her business. However, most of the services are dynamic in nature in terms of their availability, robustness and the mobility of the user. These services also appear impermeable to the end users i.e. the end users do not get to control and configure the services in a way so as to feel like programmers developing services to accomplish certain goals. We envisage that in such a context end users, with no programming knowledge, will have a hard time to find services of their choice and that it will be hard for these end users to derive substantial benefits from these services. Unguided automation is not the answer to this problem as a particular service suggested automatically by a dynamic composition mechanism may not be suitable for a specific user at a certain point of time and in a given context. On the other hand explicit specification of service instances will mean that the user will be bogged down with the problem of runtime optimization in a dynamic environment where several factors as indicated earlier determine the availability of the services having required functionality. In order to address this issue we introduce the notion of intelligent service composition where the end user will have a great degree of flexibility to define his or her own rules or conditions based on which an optimal composition will be made automatically from a set of collaborative services by runtime adaptation in a specific context and point in time. This is a step forward compared to the present dynamic composition mechanisms which do not facilitate end users defining their own conditions dictating the selection of specific service instance at runtime. We have developed this conceptual solution to bring end users towards adaptive use of services. We validated our conceptual solution through a scenario-based evaluation approach with an implementation of a proof-of-concept prototype.