The verbal protocol method is used extensively in computer usability studies. This study was designed to test the feasibility of using the verbal protocol method as a means of conducting field research on the online catalogue. Ten undergraduate students conducted their own research on DRA’s Infogate. As they searched, they talked aloud about what keys they were pressing, what was happening on the screen, and their reactions. Transcripts of sessions were analyzed. A total of 65 different problems or comments were noted during search sessions, with 11 problems or comments noted in three or more sessions. This supports the hypothesis that the verbal protocol method is a valuable means of identifying common problems for users. It is suggested that the verbal protocol method offers great potential as a research tool in librarianship, for example in the area of interface design.

This thesis presents two main achievements. The first is a novel link-layer encryption protocol for wireless sensor networks. The protocol design aims to reduce energy consumption by reducing security-related communication overhead. This is done by merging security-related data of consecutive packets. The merging is based on simple mathematical operations. It helps to reduce energy consumption by eliminating the requirement to transmit security-related fields in the packet. The protocol is named the Compact Security Protocol and is referred to as C-Sec. In addition to energy savings, the C-Sec protocol also includes a unique security feature of hiding the packet header information. This feature makes it more difficult to trace the flow of wireless communication, and helps to minimize the effect of replay attacks. The C-Sec protocol is rigorously tested and compared with well-known related protocols. Performance evaluations demonstrate that C-Sec protocol outperforms other protocols in terms of energy savings. The protocol is evaluated with respect to other performance metrics including queuing delay and error probability. The C-Sec operation requires fast encryption, which leads to a second major contribution: The SN-Sec, a 32-bit RISC secure wireless sensor platform with hardware cryptographic primitives. The security vulnerabilities in current WSNs platforms are scrutinized and the main approaches to implementing their cryptographic primitives are compared in terms of security, time, and energy efficiency. The SN-Sec secures these vulnerabilities and provides more time and energy efficiency. The choice of cryptographic primitives for SN-Sec is based on their compatibility with the constrained nature of WSNs and their security. The AES implementation has the best data-path and S-Box design in the literature. All SHA family members are implemented and compared to choose the most compatible with WSN constraints. An efficient elliptic-curve processor design is proposed. It has the least mathematical operations compared to elliptic-curve processors proposed for WSNs in the literature. It also exploits parallelism among mathematical operations to compute elliptic-curve point multiplication with minimal amount of clock cycles. SN-Sec is implemented using VHDL. Experimental results using synthesis for Spartan-6 low-power FPGA shows that the proposed design has very reasonable computational time and energy consumption.

We introduce a novel Syntax-based Security Testing (SST) framework that uses a protocol specification to effectively perform security testing on text-based communication protocols. A protocol specification of a particular text-based protocol under-tested (TPUT) represents its syntactic grammar and static semantic contracts on the grammar. Mutators written in TXL break the syntactic and semantic constraints of the protocol specification to generate test cases. Different protocol specification testing strategies can be joined together to yield a compositional testing approach. SST is independent of any particular text-based protocols. The power of SST stems from the way it obtains test cases from the protocol specifications. We also use the robust parsing technique with TXL to parse a TPUT. SST has successfully revealed security faults in different text-based protocol applications such as web applications and kOganizer. We also demonstrate SST can mimic the venerable PROTOS Test-Suite: co-http-reply developed by University of Oulu. / Thesis (Ph.D, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2010-04-30 16:01:18.048

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The present day manufacturing environment has forced manufacturing systems to be flexible and adaptable to be able to match the product demands and frequent introduction of new products and technologies. This research forms part of a greater research initiative that looks at the development of the reconfigurable manufacturing paradigm. Previous research has shown that the lack of development of a Modular Reconfigurable Manufacturing Tools (MRMT) and Open Architecture Control System (OACS) is currently a key limiting factor to the establishment of Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems (RMS), which has been the primary motivation for this research. Open Architecture (OA) systems aim to bring the ideas of RMS to control systems for machining systems. An OA system incorporates vendor neutrality, portability, extendibility, scalability and modularity. The research has proposed, designed and developed a novel solution that incorporates these core principles allowing the system to be flexible in mechanical and control architectures. In doing so, the system can be reconfigured at any time to match the specific manufacturing functionality required at that time thereby prolonging the lifecycle of the machine via multiple reconfigurations over time, in addition to decreasing the cost of system modifications due to a well-defined modular system. The reconfiguration and machining variance is achieved by the introduction of mechanical and control modules that extend the Degrees of Freedom (DOF’s) available to the system. The OACS has been developed as a modular solution that links closely to the existing mechanical modularity on the RMT to maximize the reconfigurability of the system. The aim was to create a one to one link between mechanical and electronic hardware and the software system. This has been achieved by the addition of microcontroller based distributed modules which acts as the interface between the electro-mechanical machine axes via hardwired signals and the host PC via the CAN bus communication interface. The distributed modules have been developed on different microcontrollers, which have successfully demonstrated the openness and customizability of the system. On the host PC, the user is presented with a GUI that allows the user to configure the control system based on the MRMT physical configuration. The underlying software algorithms such as, text Interpretation, linear interpolation, PID or PI controllers and determination of kinematic viability are part of the OACS and are used at run time for machine operation. The machining and control performance of the system is evaluated on the previously developed MRMT. The performance evaluation also covers the analysis of the reconfigurability and scalability of the system. The research is concluded with a presentation based on conclusions drawn from the research covering the challenges, limitations and problems that OA and RMS can face before MRMT become readily available for industry. / M.Sc.Eng. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 2013.

With the rapid development of the Internet connected technologies and applications, people are keen on embracing the convenience and practi-­‐‑ calities they brings. As all kinds of technologies improve, the Internet of Things matures and is able to provide more advanced services to people, which connects a variety of devices, systems and applications beyond traditional machine-­‐‑to-­‐‑machine. However, it covers a variety of devices, protocols and applications, which makes it much more complex than a normal network. Nevertheless, equipped with appropriate security solutions, the Internet of Things is promising to bring us more conven-­‐‑ iences and be widely applied in our daily life. And like the main appli-­‐‑ cation areas, wireless sensor networks with a frequent but short com-­‐‑ munication character, it requires an efficient and flexible protocol to protect the information. To protect the traffic of the Internet of Things is the focal point of this research work. Although many protocols for the Internet have been put forward, it is still not enough to meet the increas-­‐‑ ingly complex requirements from applications. Many of them are not efficient enough to adapt the device diversity and timely communica-­‐‑ tion environment. This research work is trying to address this problem, by proposing a peer-­‐‑to-­‐‑peer security protocol to satisfy this varied environment. Secure communication is implemented on an open sourced platform for the Internet of Things. The philosophy of the platform it implemented on is also inherited to this protocol and the implementation. It avoids unnecessary handshakes between entities, which makes it more efficient in a wireless sensor network. Modulariza-­‐‑ tion and unit test are adapted in implementation to enhance the robust of the system. Its dynamic security level adjustment feature satisfies the realistic demand on one platform this protocol is implemented on. Finally, with a comparison test and an analysis using the BAN logic, the result shows that the proposed protocol is efficient to meet the specific goals and applicable for the platform. / SensibleThings Platform

It is widely accepted that OAuth is the most popular authorization scheme adopted and implemented by industrial and academic world, however, it is difficult to adapt OAuth to the situation in which online applications registered with one cloud party intends to access data residing in another cloud party. In this thesis, by leveraging Ciphertext-Policy Attribute Based Encryption technique and Elgamal-like mask over the protocol, we propose a reading authorization scheme among diverse clouds, which is called fuzzy authorization, to facilitate an application registered with one cloud party to access to data residing in another cloud party. More importantly, we enable the fuzziness of authorization thus to enhance the scalability and flexibility of file sharing by taking advantage of the innate connections of Linear Secret-Sharing Scheme and Generalized Reed Solomon code. Furthermore, by conducting error checking and error correction, we eliminate operation of satisfying a access tree. In addition, the automatic revocation is realized with update of TimeSlot attribute when data owner modifies the data. We prove the security of our schemes under the selective-attribute security model. The protocol flow of fuzzy authorization is implemented with OMNET++ 4.2.2 and the bi-linear pairing is realized with PBC library. Simulation results show that our scheme can achieve fuzzy authorization among heterogeneous clouds with security and efficiency.