<p>Plan and carry out perception tests of time-varying scene composition, spatial and temporal resolution of scene objects, respectively, as defined in DMP. Base the time-variation on short time intervals of only tenths of milliseconds. Use and extend test setup as in 'The Hems Lab - Perceptual test of scene objects with variable temporal resolution' project, autumn 2008. Find an economic model that can be used to help businesses assess market potential of new technology (software, hardware) and show how this can be used in a DMP setting.</p>

<p>Unauthorized access to computers and theft of proprietary information are two problems leading to large economical losses for organizations around the world. Thousands of laptops often containing vital information are lost at airports every day. Organizations and people in general often believe that the sensitive information is inaccessible because of the login mechanism. Even though we demand that our systems should prevent unauthorized access, we also expect that the access to the operating system can be restored when a password is lost. We require that authorized persons can regain the access to the computer, while unauthorized persons are prevented access. A good solution to reset or recover the Administrator password should exist on all operating systems. This thesis begins with addressing weaknesses in 8 different operating systems. It presents a comprehensive step-by-step guide for already existing procedures and tools that can be used to reset or recover the Administrator password. In total 6 procedures and 10 tools are presented. Because some procedures required a lot of interaction from the user, we decided to automate these and include them in our self made tool named Yet Another Local Password (tool) (YALP). We were able to reset the passwords on all of the 8 operating systems. On some of the operating systems only a few passwords were recovered, and based on that, a more comprehensive password recovery study was desirable. It should be noted that even though Microsoft has introduced a more secure password handling mechanism on newer Windows operating system, many persons and corporations still use the outdated Windows XP operating system. This is partly because Windows Vista has been criticized for its weak performance. An empirical password study was carried out to see what percentage of 30 carefully chosen passwords could be revealed. Some disturbing results were obtained. During a period of 8 hours, 100% of the passwords created on a Windows XP system were revealed. The results from this study show that the use of password as an authentication mechanism for operating systems will not offer sufficient protection in the future, and that other mechanisms have to be considered. Based on results obtained from this thesis, a paper named All in a day's work: Password cracking for the rest of us was submitted to The 14th Nordic Conference on Secure IT Systems, NordSec 2009, in Oslo, Norway. In addition, a poster named Generation of Rainbow Tables was presented at The 8th Annual Meeting on High Performance Computing and Infrastructure, NOTUR2009, in Trondheim, Norway. The poster and the paper are included in Appendix F and Appendix G, respectively.</p>

<p>Semantic Web Services (SWS) are a facility towards full automation of service usage, providing seamless integration of services that are published and accessible on the Web. Based on Semanic Web technology SWS is simply a semantic annotation of the functionalitites and interfaces of Web Services. In the very same way that ontologies and metadata lanaguages will facilitate the integration of static data on the Web, the annotation of services wil help to facilitate the automation of service discovery, service composition, service contracting, and execution.In this thesis we demonstrate how SWS technology can be applied to a network management system (NMS), which can install SNMP managers during run-time in systems running TAPAS platform. Several reasoning applications are made and integrated with the existing system. In addition, we specify a set of Semantic Web Services described using OWL-S, in order to execute these applications.</p>

<p>Reactive systems that provide services to an environment typically interact with numerous users or other components. Session multiplicity enables a component to keep track of these interactions by handling each of them as separate conversations. Session reflection is the ability to look into the state and properties of these conversations at run time, and use that for deciding the actions to be taken when certain events occur. This thesis addresses how to support session multiplicity and reflection during code generation of executable state machines and a runtime support system that can execute them. Using code generation, certain UML composite structures and state machines can be transformed to deployable, executable components automatically. To support these features, an interface for using them is offered to the components that comprise an application and some internal mechanisms have been added to a runtime support system. The interface includes methods for sending messages, creating new sessions and session state machines and retrieving information about run time state machine instances. The internal mechanisms include keeping track of components and sessions, giving intra-component messages priority, creating new session state machine instances and changing the addressing scheme and routing mechanisms to include session state machines. To put the thesis' results into context and to some extent prove that they are good, a proof of concept, multi-player rock-paper-scissors game has been implemented.</p>

<p>This thesis describes the basic theory of multiparty computation (MPC) in addition to a fully functional distributed Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) protocol for three players implemented in Virtual Ideal Functionality Framework (VIFF) using secure MPC (SMPC). MPC can be used to solve problems where n players, each with a private input xi, wants to compute a function with public output f(x1, x2,…, xn) = y, such that the private inputs remains secret for each player, but the output y is public. A cornerstone in MPC is the concept of secret sharing. In secret sharing, a dealer has a secret and gives each participating player a share of the secret in such a way that a certain number of the players are needed in order to reconstruct the secret. The number of players needed to reconstruct the secret is referred to as the threshold of the scheme. VIFF is a high level programming framework that allows programmers to create applications using SMPC for any number of players in an easy, efficient and secure manner. The distributed RSA solution implemented in VIFF includes distributed key generation, decryption and signature, which are the main functions needed for the distributed RSA scheme, and is based on the distributed RSA algorithm proposed by Dan Boneh and Matthew Franklin in 1997. Four improvements compared to Boneh and Franklin's algorithm are described, two related to the run-time and two related to the security of the algorithm. The run-time improvements are regarding the distributed trial division step and the local trial division on the revealed N, both implemented. The security improvements are related to the way a random number is used to secure a revealed number. The first security improvement is related to the distributed trial division, whereas the second security improvement is regarding the alternative step in the biprimality test. The first security improvement, which is also the more important of the two, has been implemented in this thesis. At last some benchmarks regarding the key generation, decryption and signature process are presented, which indicates that the current implementation is best suited for scenarios where the distributed RSA keys can be generated in advance, whereas the decryption and signature process is fast enough for any type of scenario. The key generation process can become much faster with a few adjustments described at the end of the thesis.</p>

<p>This Thesis will analyze the standard 1619.1 published by the IEEE. The aim of this standard is to provide authenticated encryption to stored data with AES algorithm working in XTS mode. XTS-AES is a 128-bit block cipher characterized by the use of two AES encryptions with two different keys of the same size, tweak values to add uncertainty to cipher data, (2128) Galois fields and The Ciphertext Stealing technique for data units not perfectly divisible into 128-bit blocks. There is no unanimous agreement about the profits of this standard so various aspects such as the use of two different keys, implementation in other areas or the support of the storage industry will be a source of controversy. Some commercial software and hardware that implement XTS-AES encryption mode will be presented and used to test and analyze the security properties presented by the standard IEEE 1619.1. Keywords. AES, XTS, Tweak values, Ciphertext Stealing, XTS-AES Comments.</p>

<p>The assignment includes the following tasks 1. Study the Telenor Connected Object (COOS) infrastructure 2. Study existing load balancing techniques that are relevant for COOS 3. Make a model of COOS in order to investigate load balancing techniques 4. Propose usage scenarios for COOS which need performance differentiation and load balancing 5. Conduct load balancing experiments on scenarios with different techniques 6. Propose principles for load balancing in COOS • How can you achieve effective routing across different (access) network technologies? Load balancing of traffic – optimised for node performance (e.g. battery and/or bandwidth limitations, least cost routing). How can one distribute load across different networks (e.g. wifi, bluetooth, 3G...) in an effective manner?</p>

<p>This thesis provides an introduction to the field of Multimedia Distribution Networks (MDN) and is written as the first part the Aeetes Project. It compares potential MDN architectures and technologies, and makes a proposal for a suitable IMDN architecture based on it. The thesis defines the concepts of MDN and IMDN, and describes the current state of the art of MDN technologies and implementations. An Internet-based Multimedia Distribution Network (IMDN) is a type of overlay network, comprised of a cluster of servers on the Internet which is used to distribute multimedia content to end-users in a cost-efficient manner with better quality of service compared to regular distribution models. It also makes a comparison of the technology and performance of various existing MDN architectures with focus on their advantages and limitations. Based on this comparison the possible architectures are evaluated and a proposal is made for an Aeetes implementation candidate. The suggested architecture is focused on low cost and simple deployment, and is designed to be used in both academic and commercial settings. It also attempts to be extensible and to allow for simple modifications as it might become the base system upon which a range of further work in the field of Multimedia Distribution Networks is built.</p>

<p>Today the Internet is mostly used for services that require low or none security. The commercial and governmental applications have started to emerge but met problems since they require strong authentication, which is both difficult and costly to realize. The SIM card used in mobile phones is a tamper resistant device that contains strong authentication mechanisms. It would be very convenient and cost-efficient if Internet services could use authentication methods based on the SIM. This master thesis presents an analysis and a design of a generic authentication system based on SIM, together with a detailed description of an implemented prototype. The proposed system, called the Generic SIM Authentication System (GAS), provides a strong authentication mechanism. The GAS builds upon the existing GSM authentication infrastructure, thus allows re-use of GSM expertise from the mobile operators. New services can easily be supported, such that these can benefit from strong authentication. By gradually implementing more authentication mechanisms (e.g. OTP and PKI) on the SIM, it will be able to support several levels of security. This will result in a generic authentication system satisfying the security needs for nowadays and also for the future. In order to design the GAS, the thesis starts by giving an overview of authentication and relevant technologies, before the requirements to the system, both functional and non-functional, are defined. Then different interaction diagrams, collaboration diagrams and sequence diagrams are presented, and the necessary components and interfaces in the system are outlined. This thesis builds on two student projects finished December 2005, where tentative high-level architectures for utilizing SIM-based authentication were proposed. A Prototype has been developed in Java to demonstrate the GAS, and includes both a client (Supplicant) and a server (Authenticator) part. The communication between the Supplicant and the other components in the authentication system is based on EAP, which is a general authentication protocol supporting multiple authentication methods. When performing the GSM authentication the EAP-SIM protocol is used. The Prototype has been tested end-to-end, i.e. from the SIM to the Telenor GSM HLR/AuC, via IP-based network. Three different services have been developed to demonstrate how easily the SIM authentication can be integrated. The first demo service shows how to integrate the authentication with JSP technology and Apache Tomcat. The second service, MyService, is another example of how the authentication service could be integrated into a web portal using PHP to demonstrate that the Prototype is independent of the service implementation language. MyService also illustrates how the service provider can control the registration of new users and link up with their SIM identity. The last service, GasSpot, shows how to integrate the GAS to authenticate users to a Captive Portal. The access is controlled by the gateway, which is implemented using ChilliSpot. Based on the results of the master thesis, the authors have written the paper “A Generic Authentication System based on SIM”, which has been submitted and accepted for publication at the ICISP’06 Conference in Cap Esterel, Côte d’Azur, France, August 26-29, 2006.</p>

<p>To make services for mobile devices more user friendly wireless communication is a very helpful tool. Wireless communication normally requires no or very little user input, and communication over a wireless interface is therefore in many cases preferred. A trend today is for example that radio or TV shows are recorded to your mobile device during the day. When arriving your home/office the media file can be transferred or streamed to your desktop computer and/or stereo for better sound and larger screen. Normally this is done using a docking station, but this could also be done through a wireless interface. Combining wireless communication with more advanced service logic opens the possibilities for easier file sharing between mobile devices in a peer-to-peer fashion. This thesis evaluates ActorFrame as a framework for service creation in Bluetooth ad hoc networks. Through the thesis limitations in the Bluetooth protocol and mobile devices supporting the Bluetooth protocol are discovered. One of the known limitations of Bluetooth is the range limitation, since Bluetooth only is a short range protocol. To extend the range between Bluetooth enabled devices they must be able to function as mediators. For this to be possible information regarding available services on the different devices must be exchanged. This task is performed by routing protocols. The existing routing protocol in ActorFrame is evaluated, and a study of alternative wired and wireless routing protocols is also done. Besides user friendliness a service should be as cheap as possible. This way as many people as possible will use the service. The Bluetooth functionality integrated in the framework evaluated in this thesis could be utilized in a beneficial way. For example the functionality could be used in peer-to-peer kind of services mentioned above, where a media file is transferred from the mobile device to the desktop computer. Other wireless technologies could also be used for this purpose, namely GPRS or UMTS. As opposed to Bluetooth transmission, which is free, data transmission using either of these two technologies cost money to use. If ActorFrame could be used in a beneficial way depends on the performance of the Bluetooth functionality. Performance below what a certain service demands, where UMTS can offer the required performance quality, would imply that the framework could not be used in a beneficial way. To test this performance the possibilities of streaming MP3’s via the Bluetooth interface using ActorFrame based devices is studied, where a prototype is designed. Through this study limitations both regarding mobile devices running applications based on the ActorFrame framework and the framework itself are discovered.</p>