Trabalho realizado na Adclick, orientado pelo Engº Pedro Roque / Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Industrial e Gestão. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 2012

Magíster en Tecnologías de la Información / En la actualidad, la necesidad de una sólida estrategia de gestión de acceso e identidad se ha convertido en parte integral de los recursos de tecnología de una empresa. Las soluciones para estas estrategias pueden permitir a las empresas aumentar la satisfacción de los usuarios y reforzar sus posturas generales de seguridad. Sin embargo, el crecimiento de la computación en la nube y una mano de obra móvil cada vez más distribuida hacen que la gestión de acceso e identidad sea más compleja en el día a día. Una empresa de seguros de Chile se enfrenta al problema anterior. La empresa desea proveer de acceso seguro y controlado a una API de servicios por parte de aplicaciones de terceros. También busca resolver una debilidad en los procesos de identificación con respecto a las aplicaciones de terceros y es cuando los usuarios desean autenticarse. Cada proceso de ingreso exige distintas identidades ocasionando que un mismo usuario tenga más de una cuenta. Existen distintas alternativas y soluciones en el mercado, las mismas realizan desde la gestión de la identidad hasta la gestión de la autorización. El protocolo OAuth 2.0 es parte de estas soluciones, es el protocolo estándar de la industria para autorizar accesos limitados a las aplicaciones y los datos, motivo por el cual ha sido escogido como parte de la estrategia de seguridad propuesta. El protocolo se basa en la autorización delegada, es decir poder otorgarles a las aplicaciones acceso a la información en nombre de un usuario en vez de usar una cuenta por aplicación. Se realiza una validación funcional de la solución en una aplicación móvil de terceros. La aplicación, mediante el protocolo, puede acceder satisfactoriamente a servicios expuestos en la API de la empresa. Se logra mejorar la gestión de la identidad al permitir que los usuarios de esta aplicación utilicen la cuenta propia que poseen con la empresa. Cumpliendo con estos objetivos se obtiene la aceptación de la solución para la empresa de seguros y se toma como estándar para futuras aplicaciones de terceros. Este trabajo de tesis me deja como enseñanza la diferencia entre los protocolos de autenticación y autorización, como abordar la gestión de la identidad en los sistemas informáticos y sobre todo como interactuar con una API protegida con el protocolo OAuth.

With sales reaching $4.4 billion dollars in the first half of 2006 in the United States alone, and an estimated 80% of the world receiving coverage for their wireless phones in that year, interest in these devices as more than mere communicators has greatly increased. In the mid-to-late 1990s, digital cameras began to be incorporated into cellphones, followed shortly thereafter by Global Positioning System (GPS) hardware allowing location-based services to be offered to customers. Since then the use of mobile phone hardware for non-communication purposes has continued to expand. Some models, such as the Motorola V3M, have been specifically geared toward the storage and display of music and visual media, as well as receiving Internet broadcasts. It is perhaps surprising, therefore, that relatively little has been done from an academic standpoint to provide a qualitative and comprehensive method of evaluating the performance of mobile phones regarding their ability to function as computing devices. While some manuals do offer comparisons of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that aid in the development of cellphone applications, little documentation exists to provide objective measurements of performance parameters. This dissertation proposes a framework for evaluating the performance of mobile phones from a computational angle, focusing on three criteria: the processing power of the Central Processing Unit (CPU), data transfer capabilities, and the performance of the phone's GPS functionality for the appropriation of geographic location data. Power consumption has always been a major source of interest in the study of computer systems, and the limited hardware resources of mobile devices such as laptop computers, Personal Data Assistants (PDAs) and cellular telephones makes this a key concern. The power consumption factors associated with operation are therefore considered alongside the three core criteria being studied in this framework. In addition to framework design, software tools for the evaluation of cellphones were also developed, and these were applied to a test case of the Sanyo SCP-7050 model. This provides an example of the utility of the framework in evaluating existing phone models and a foundation for the assessment of new models as they are released.

BSD Socket API for Simulator is a project to run untouched Real World Application (RWA) binaries on the powerful modern general-purpose network simulators. BSD Socket API for Simulator is designed to eliminate most of the drawbacks of previous works. It is simulator independence, so it can make use of the powerful functionality and versatile tools provided by modern general-purpose simulators such as NS-2. It is fully compatible with BSD Socket API, so RWA can be run on it without re-linking and re-compiling. It is transparent to the RWA, so RWAs are run on BSD Socket API for Simulator as they are on normal operating systems. BSD Socket API for Simulator is built on the concept of message redirecting. It has two critical parts: shared library and customized simulator application. The shared library is loaded into the address space of RWA. On one hand, messages sent by RWA are captured by the shared library and redirected to the customized simulator application. On the other hand, messages from simulator are redirected by the customized simulator application to the shared library. BSD Socket API for Simulator has been intensively tested. The test results show that it functions as expected and it has an acceptable performance.

With continuous advancement in silicon technology and high feature demands on consumer electronics, the complexity of embedded software has led the software development effort to dominate System-On-Chip (SoC) design. Virtual Prototype (VP) addresses the problem by enabling early software development before hardware arrival. However, VP still poses challenges: 1) Instruction Set Simulator (ISS) degrades simulation time, 2) Development is restricted to embedded processor specific tools and 3) Applications and drivers are dependent on system software completion. In this work, we propose an abstraction framework which: 1) Removes ISS from VP, achieving native host software execution time, 2) Activates rich suites of desktop development tools in host by compiling embedded software in host binary and 3) Allows system software independent application and driver development. With this framework, we successfully demonstrated up to 2000% speed-up in VP run-time over conventional VP and improved software development productivity significantly.

With continuous advancement in silicon technology and high feature demands on consumer electronics, the complexity of embedded software has led the software development effort to dominate System-On-Chip (SoC) design. Virtual Prototype (VP) addresses the problem by enabling early software development before hardware arrival. However, VP still poses challenges: 1) Instruction Set Simulator (ISS) degrades simulation time, 2) Development is restricted to embedded processor specific tools and 3) Applications and drivers are dependent on system software completion. In this work, we propose an abstraction framework which: 1) Removes ISS from VP, achieving native host software execution time, 2) Activates rich suites of desktop development tools in host by compiling embedded software in host binary and 3) Allows system software independent application and driver development. With this framework, we successfully demonstrated up to 2000% speed-up in VP run-time over conventional VP and improved software development productivity significantly.

This report is going to be focusing on the development of a promotion page and login system for the web production company Adoreyou. The promotion page and login will be parts of a new taxi application for iPhone that lets the customer book a taxi and drivers manage the requests from the customers. Taxi application’s that let customer’s book trips are nothing new but they are constantly being explored and developed. The most common practice is to let the customer fill in from what address he or she wants to be picked up and to where he or she wants to be taken. Then the price is set in the application depending on the distance and most likely other factors like weekday and time. Some of them do not have functionalities such as being able to choose which type of car you want to order or managing payments from the app itself. This taxi app will be developed to take it to the next level and utilize GPS to locate cars close to the customers. The promotion page will be constructed in HTML and CSS. The login system will be constructed in the PHP framework Codeigniter and connected to Parse.com through an API. The project has been using the so called waterfall model to develop the promotion page and the login system. The model has been used throughout the project and each stage was been checked with the project manager on Adoreyou before the next stage was initialized.

Software Transactional Memory (STM) helps programmers write correct concurrent code by allowing them to identify atomic sections rather than focusing on the mechanics of concurrency control. Given code with atomic sections, the compiler and STM runtime can work together to ensure proper controlled access to shared memory. STM runtimes use either lazy or eager version management. Lazy versioning buffers transaction updates, whereas eager versioning applies updates in-place. The current set of primitives suit lazy versioning since memory needs to be accessed through the runtime. We present a new set of runtime primitives that better suit eager versioned STM. We propose a novel extension to the compiler/runtime interface, consisting of memory reservations and memory releases. These extensions enable optimizations specific to eager versioned runtimes. A memory reservation allows a transaction to perform instrumentation-free access on a memory address. A release allows a read-only address to be modified by another transaction. Together, these reduce the instrumentation overhead required to support STM and improve concurrency between readers and writers. We have implemented these primitives and evaluated its performance on the STAMP benchmarks. Our results show strong performance and scalability improvements to eager versioned algorithms.

Information Technology (IT) evolution in the recent decades has been able to grow the mobility of the end-user. A contributing factor has impacted and improved the smartphone area. This, in turn, has changed end-users’ expectations and experiences in the recent years in terms of available services, which have made mobile applications (apps) to find their place in daily life. In line with the significant growth of smartphones, as the iPhone and Android phones, is also the development of mobile applications exploded. Mobile use has - with this - fundamentally changed and much of what customers used to do on the computer, they do now on their mobile. It makes of course requires that third-parties have a mobile presence and correct utilization, this new arena enormous business opportunities. Hence, as mobile devices become a more visible business tool, it becomes important for organizations to develop applications to meet customer needs and stay competitive. Third-party development is relevantly in the core of software development nowadays. The introduction of smartphones and tablet devices, the associated products, and services in the form of apps has significantly changed software developments practices for developers. The aim of this research formulated to study the development process and practices associated with third-parties and their effects on dealing with various mobile platforms and boundary resources (SKDs and APIs). Qualitative study and exploratory design are extensively conducted for data collection and analysis. Primary data is gathered based on experiences, opinions, and insights from the experts in the subject, and secondary data is gathered from literature, which constantly supports the primary data and ensures the research credibility. The main contribution and results of this study are the factors and development process that third-party developers take into consideration when developing apps for iOS and Android such as ecosystem, programing language, platform, programing model, tools, development process model, supply chain, and submission apps. The success of the digital ecosystems and platform knowledge adopted by Apple and Google has gained a lot of attention from developers in the last years concerning mobile application development. This, in turn, was the key factor of their success at the smartphones market and the portal for developers from all the world.

ABSTRACT Redirecting the inspection plan to place emphasis on high risk equipment items is not the only objective when implementing Risk Base Inspection (RBI). Rather it would be much more fruitful if company staff were educated to be equipped with the capability of identifying potential risks and were willing to actually put into real practice in eliminating all these potential threats to an enterprise. Since its release, the API-580 technology has seen growing acceptance and becomes a popular methodology in maintaining the mechanical integrity of pressure equipment and piping. In addition to U.S.A, many other country including European nations and Japan have also assimilated the same risk concepts into regulations that require plant operators to aim for practical performance of equipment management, not at the extent of obligations required by the government. Such a risk-based concept is not just incorporated in regulations, when utilized in close conjunction with plant maintenance and inspection, becomes a powerful tool in helping determine optimal inspection intervals of pressure equipment. In order for the equipment management system to perform effectively, fundamental tasks such as failure mechanisms identification and effectiveness of inspection methods are keys to a successful RBI program. Some might question Risk Base Inspection (RBI) to be a conservative, less aggressive approach that rather than opting for more aggressive managerial methods, it recommends to focus on the whole life cycle of plant equipment. Keywords: API-581¡BRBI¡Bbusiness risk¡Bbusiness administration¡Bquantitative analysis¡Bconsequence analysis¡Brisk base inspection