Electronic Business, including eBanking, eCommerce and eGovernmental services, is today based on a large variety of security solutions, comprising electronic IDs provided by a broad community of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) vendors. Significant differences in implementations of those solutions introduce a problem of lack of interoperability in electronic business, which have not yet been resolved by standardization and interoperability initiatives based on existing PKI trust models. It is not only the technical interoperability of electronic IDs which today makes many electronic transactions impossible. The main obstacle to global interoperability of electronic IDs is the lack of trust in digital certificates issued by various Certification Authorities (CAs). Relying Parties (RPs) need to trust digital certificates in order to be able to validate them. We observe that the multi-vendor PKI community lacks an independent source of electronic IDs quality information, which could make digital certificate validation possible on a global scale. Therefore, this thesis presents the concept of a new PKI trust model which introduces a Validation Authority (VA) as a single trust point in the global PKI trust network. The main goal of this thesis is to develop a model of Global Validation Service (GVS), which uses Global Validation Authority (GVA), based on the VA concept, to provide digital certiÞcate validation and signature veriÞcation to Relying Parties. The presented research focuses on investigating technical, legal and business issues which would enable RPs to delegate the certificate validation to an independent Validation Authority.

The aim of this thesis has been to develop and validate the user interface of a service composition tool for creating mobile tourist services in a city environment. The project has been conducted in cooperation with SINTEF and the Norwegian research project UbiCompForAll. As part of this thesis, a number of scenarios were created initially, showing what kind of functionalities accessed using mobile devices might be useful for tourists in the city. Based on these scenarios, the graphical user interface of a composition service tool was created and then assessed through the involvement of several users using a paper prototyping approach. The results from the paper prototyping assessment showed that the proposed interface is generally easy to understand and use, although there were a number of improvements necessary in the areas of information abstraction, module naming and letting users be able to see the final product of the composition. In addition, as part of the assessment of the proposed interface, the realizability of the services specified using this interface was evaluated. An architecture for the service derived from the specification developed by the user was defined. This enabled us to check that all the information necessary for creating the composed services can be provided when using the proposed user interface.

This thesis was written in cooperation with Telenor as part of the project ``Tap2Pay''. The goal was to investigate usablity challenges for contactless mobile payment at a physical point of sale and identify central themes and trade-offs. To acheive this a two iterations of a prototype was developed, based on an analysis of the payment situation. These iterations were used in one workshop each. After analyzing the results from the workshop, a strong card metaphor was identified as a central theme. The card metaphor had a great influence on the users' preferred solutions. Card selection routines was also a central theme. There is also a genuine trade-off between efficiency and confidence. The users are likely to lack confidence in the security of efficent solutions, but in order to increase confidence, efficiency must be sacrificed.

Location systems are seen as a promising technology for tracking people and objects to improve efficiency and quality in the healthcare domain. To increase the chances of success when introducing this new technology there are certain operational capabilities that need to be understood. The purpose of this Thesis is to explore how these operational capabilities can be assessed by experiment. The thesis proposes a method for describing the operational capabilities of a location system using a two-dimensional matrix of purposes of location systems in the healthcare domain, as found in literature. Using this matrix it is possible to assess and predict the requirements for a location system based on a classification of the purpose of the installation. Conversely it is possible to use the same matrix to find purposes that can be solved with a given location system. Using the Sonitor Indoor Positioning System it was also demonstrated how the operational capabilities of a location system could be found through a series of small low cost and low effort experiments. In conclusion three dimensions relating to operational capabilities were identified: granularity, resolution, and concurrency. Granularity and concurrency were shown to be successfully assessed through experiment, while resolution was found analytically. We also found a method to predict the impact of infrastructure size on the operational capability of the location system based on the same small experiments.

Web applications are becoming more and more popular in means of modern information interaction, which leads to a growth of the demand of Web applications. At the same time, Web application vulnerabilities are drastically increasing. This will inevitably expose more Web application users to malicious attacks, causing them to lose valuable information or be harmed in other ways. One of the most important software security practices that is used to mitigate the increasing number of vulnerabilities is security testing. The most commonly applied security testing methodologies today are extensive and are sometimes too complicated with their many activities and phases. Because of this complexity, developers very often tend to neglect the security testing process. Today, there is only a few security testing methodologies developed especially for Web applications and their agile development environment. It is therefore necessary to give attention to security testing methodologies for Web applications. A survey of state-of-the-art security testing methodologies for Web applications is performed. Based on some predefined criterions, Agile Security Testing is selected as the most adequate security testing methodology for Web applications, and is further extended to support all the predefined criterions. Furthermore, the extended Agile Security Testing methodology (EAST) is integrated into the Software Development Life Cycle applied by the Administrative Information Services group at the Department of General Infrastructure Services at CERN−The European Organization for Nuclear Research. Finally, by using the EAST methodology and the security testing methodology applied by the AIS group (which is an ad hoc way of performing security tests), an evaluation of the EAST methodology compared to existing ad hoc ways of performing security tests is made. The security testing process is carried out two times using the EAST methodology and two times using the ad hoc approach. In total, 9 vulnerability classes are tested. The factors that are used to measure the efficiency is: (1) the amount of time spent on the security testing process, (2) the amount of vulnerabilities found during the security testing process and (3) the ability to mitigate false-positives during the security testing process. The results show that the EAST methodology is approximately 21% more effective in average regarding time spent, approximately 95% more effective regarding the amount of vulnerabilities found, and has the ability to mitigate false-positives, compared to existing ad hoc ways of performing security tests. These results show that structured security testing of Web applications is possible not being too complicated with many activities and phases. Furthermore, it mitigates three important factors that are used as basis to neglect the security testing process. These factors are: The complexity of the testing process, the “too time-consuming” attitude against security testing of Web applications and that it’s considered to lack a significant payoff.

This thesis elaborated on the how Software Product-Line Engineering is combined with Agile Software Development to improve Software Engineering, through investigating published case studies and performing interviews in several companies. This combination are often described as Agile Software Product-Line Engineering and our study aimed to describe what agility is for software product lines and find out more on how this approach could be realized. Agile Software Product-Line Engineering could reap benefits from the best of the two software engineering approaches combining long term strategic efforts with short term agility. By following a specified research method that combines qualitative research methods we were able to ensure validity in our analysis and generalize the findings of this study. We used both semi-structured interviews and textual analysis techniques. The companies under study seem to combine Software Product-Line Engineering and Agile Software Development with success, reducing initial investment and exploiting reuse, and we found several practices that are interesting for further study. Based on these practices we present our view of a top-down approach to Agile Software Product-Line Engineering starting with several characteristics and a proposal for a definition of the field. Further, a framework for implementing the approach based on our research is presented, before we describe our thoughts on how the practice areas of Software Product-Line Engineering can be combined with Agile Software Development practices. We think that this thesis could be used as a guideline for further study and implementation of Agile Software Product-Lines. We believe that the data we cover is comprehensive based on the small existing research field and covers the general ideas of both the fields included in the combination.

Background: The wireless technology Bluetooth has rapidly become more commonly supported by electronic devices like mobile phones and PDAs. Several companies are currently developing Bluetooth broadcasting systems to use for marketing. This report is a result of researching the use of Bluetooth broadcasting for delivering information for more general purposes, how well Bluetooth actually works for broadcasting, and also on the topic of user privacy. Results: Broadcasting with Bluetooth did work with a few devices at the same time, since Bluetooth allows up to seven connections to one Bluetooth radio at the same time. By making a passive system where the user is the one which requests information, it also will not affect users' privacy. However, my research also found a few issues with the Bluetooth which might affect a broadcast, the most noticeable of them being the somewhat low transfer rate, an issue with device discovery not always working when a lot of users are doing device discovery at the same time. The fact that it only supports seven connections is also a limitation. Basically, while it is possible to use Bluetooth for broadcasting, it might be problematic to use it for targeting a large audience. Conclusions: Even with the problems mentioned, Bluetooth broadcasting provides quite a unique way of broadcasting, and with the newer versions of Bluetooth the issues mentioned might be less of a problem. Bluetooth broadcasting definitely has some potential.

Agent oriented approaches are introduced with intention to facilitate software development in situations where other methods have shortcomings. Agents offer new possibilities and solutions to problems due to their properties and characteristics. Agent technology offer a high abstraction level and is therefore a more appropriate tool for making intelligent systems. Multi-agent systems are well suited in application areas with dynamic and challenging environments, and is advantageous in support for decision making and automation of tasks. Reduced coupling, encapsulation of functionality and a high abstraction level are some of the claimed benefits related to agent technology. Empirical studies are needed to investigate if agent technology is as good as asserted. This master thesis will give a deeper understanding of agent technology and benefits related to it. To investigate different aspects, an experiment was designed to reveal the applicability and the benefits. Two multi-agent systems were implemented and used as objects to be studied in the empirical study. As part of the investigation, a proper application area were chosen. The application area can be characterized as a scheduling problem with a dynamic and complex environment. Prometheus and JACK were used as development and modeling tools. Achieved experiences related to the development process will be presented in this report. The findings of the empirical study indicate reduced coupling and increased encapsulation of functionality. To achieve these benefits, the number of entities and functions had to be increased, and thus the number of code-lines. Further, the results indicate that more entities and lines of code will not have a significant influence on the development effort, due to the high abstraction level of agent technology.

In recent years, the World Wide Web (WWW) has become a popular platform for system development. There are several factors that make Web-development special. There is a large number of quality requirements in the Web-based system. Web projects involve people with a diverse background, such as technical people with background in programming and non-technical people with background in graphical design. In addition, the Web-based system are often not developed separately, but is integrating existing subsystems. The time-to-marked requirement is strong. Web-based system must tolerate errors and abnormal situations caused by internal component failure or user mistakes. Therefore, robustness is considered to be a critical factor for Web-based systems. Building a robust Web-based system is never an easy task. Furthermore, the end users of Web-based systems have different backgounds. Many have knowledge of the Web, others have little or no knowledge of the Web. Since Web-systems are used by people with a rather diverse background, it is important that the Web-based systems must have error tolerance and ability to survive due to user mistake. The main focus of this project is analyzing robustness of Web-based system. In order to analyze robustness of Web-based system, it is necessary to carry out a robustness assessment. Assessment methods are used to evaluate the robustness and give an estimating of the system's robustness. Further, robustness testing of a Web-based system has to be performed to get an idea of the system's current robustness. The result of estimating and test result will also be discussed, compared and evaluated. An Automatic Acceptance Testing of Web Applications (AutAT) will be used to test the robustness of a Web-based system. DAIM (Norwegian: Digtal Arkivering og Innlevering av Masteroppgaver) is the target system that will be tested the robustness of. Keywords: Robustness, testing, robustness assessment, robustness estimating, Web-based system, AutAT, DAIM.

In modern society, we rely on safely working software systems. This is the final report in a masters degree project to reveal key issues in the science field of computer software architecture and design of safety-critical software systems. A pre-study of a navigation system implied that functionality related problems and safety-critical problems do not stack one to one, but rather is a case of solving these aspects in different layers. This means that changes in software systems functionality do not necessary mean that change in safety-critical modules has to be done as well, and visa versa. To further support the findings in the pre-study, an experiment was created to investigate these matters. A group of twenty-three computer science students from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) participated as subjects in the experiment. They were asked to make two functional additions and two safety-critical additions to a software robot emulator. A dynamic web tool was created to present information to the subjects, and they could here answer surveys and upload their task solutions. The results of the experiment shows that there were not found any evidence that the quality attributes got affected by the design approaches. This means that the findings of this study suggest that there is difficult to create safety-critical versions of software architectural design patterns, because all design patterns have a set of additions and concequences to a system, and all sides of the implications of the design pattern should be discussed by the system architects before used in a safety-critical system.