The purpose of this study was to investigate how the Digital Certificate managementactors of the Public Key Infrastructure of the Internet have changed over the past two years(2021-2023). A set of one million registered top domains were queried with the intention ofmapping out their certificates. This thesis presents a frequency analysis of issuing Certifi-cate Authorities of the top one million domains and presents a concise table showing whichthe most popular Certificate Authorities are, as well as how the popularity has shifted overthe past two years. This thesis also presents tables of how well a select few major CertificateAuthorities follow the stipulated Baseline Requirements issued for the purpose of settingguidelines in handling certificates. Our findings suggest that the major Certificate Author-ities have highly increased their compliance with the requirements over the time period.The Baseline Requirements have stipulated a few new guidelines, none of which relate tothe fields of issuance, revocation and expiration. All the major Certificate Authorities haveadded more support than they have retracted and so it is clear to see that they respect theBaseline Requirements and work toward implementing them.

Thesis advisor: Rebecca Schendel / Higher education institutes have seen massive growth over the decades in terms of student enrollment. To maintain the quality of education provided to students, scholars, and practitioners have advocated for students to submit an entrance exam as a part of the admission application. This study analyzed trends in all national and standardized entrance exams (N= 119) to see which areas of knowledge and methods of assessments are most commonly utilized in entrance exams around the world. The areas of knowledge that were looked at in this study: English, Language Arts, Math, History, Government Studies, Religion, and Hard Science. The methods of assessment that were looked at in this study: Supplied response, Selected response, Practical, and Oral. Data was collected through publicly available documents and entered into a database to then analyze and recognize trends. The findings of this study show that the most common area of knowledge that is tested is Language Arts (N = 107) and the most common method of assessment is supplied response (N = 81). / Thesis (MA) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Educational Leadership and Higher Education.

Certificate transparency är ett system för att höja standarden på de certifikat som auten-tiserar hemsidor. Problemet är att certificate transparency i nuläget inte stöds av allawebbläsare. Firefox är en av dessa webbläsare och kommer vara fokus i detta pro-jekt.Målet med detta projekt är att undersöka ifall certificate transparency säkert skullekunna implementeras med hjälp av ett webbläsartillägg. Ett tillägg som implementerarcertificate transparency har testats för att se hur det beter sig när en webbsida försökerstoppa det från att utföra sitt jobb. Detta gjordes med en testmiljö som simulerar enattack från en hemsida mot en webbläsare med tillägget som har skapats. Rapportensresultat indikerar att ett tillägg som implementerar certificate transparency och kanmotstå försök att hindra dess arbete är helt möjligt att skapa.iii

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

The aim of this thesis is to study and describe the theme of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). Within the scope of minute PKI characterization there is a gradual depiction of particular structural elements, which are above all represented by cryptographic operations (asymetric and symetric cryptography, hash function and digital signature); then, there are also individual PKI subjects that are dealt with, like eg. certification authority, certificates, security protocols, secure heap etc. Last but not least there are a few complete Public Key Infrastructure implementation solutions described (OpenSSL, Microsft CA). The practical part of the thesis, a lab exercise, gives potential students the knowledge of installing OpenSSL system based certification authority. The next task educate students how to secure web server with certificate signed with own CA and also how to secure web server users‘ access control through certificates signed by the previously installed CA.

Master’s thesis analyzes in detail the security of electronic banking within the chosen banks in Czech republic. On the base of these knowledge it defines and recommendes the most secure electronic banking for Profes Project s.r.o. company. In the folowing it investigates a current electronic banking in the company and it carries out basic theoretical findings.

The thesis is focused on Regulations requierements, on the whole certification process and on requirements of the Civil Aviation Authority on sailplane HpH 304 Sm with auxiliary engine Binder for start. The separate parts and the certification procedure in the whole are described. Main part of the thesis consists of check flight and suggestion of programme of check flight. Due to the fact that certification is an extensive process, this thesis tries to describe all important aspects of certification process, so it would create a view of plane certification process.

Companies analyse large amounts of sensitive data on clusters of machines, using a framework such as Apache Hadoop to handle inter-process communication, and big data analytic tools such as Apache Spark and Apache Flink to analyse the growing amounts of data. Big data analytic tools are mainly tested on performance and reliability. Security and authentication have not been enough considered and they lack behind. The goal of this research is to improve the authentication and security for data analytic tools.Currently, the aforementioned big data analytic tools are using Kerberos for authentication. Kerberos has difficulties in providing multi factor authentication. Attacks on Kerberos can abuse the authentication. To improve the authentication, an analysis of the authentication in Hadoop and the data analytic tools is performed. The research describes the characteristics to gain an overview of the security of Hadoop and the data analytic tools. One characteristic is that the usage of the transport layer security (TLS) for the security of data transportation. TLS usually establishes connections with certificates. Recently, certificates with a short time to live can be automatically handed out.This thesis develops new authentication mechanism using certificates for data analytic tools on clusters of machines, providing advantages over Kerberos. To evaluate the possibility to replace Kerberos, the mechanism is implemented in Spark. As a result, the new implementation provides several improvements. The certificates used for authentication are made valid with a short time to live and are thus less vulnerable to abuse. Further, the authentication mechanism solves new requirements coming from businesses, such as providing multi-factor authenticationand scalability.In this research a new authentication mechanism is developed, implemented and evaluated, giving better data protection by providing improved authentication.

Today’s Web Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) builds on a homogeneous trust model. All Certificate Authorities (CAs) are equally trusted once they are marked as trusted CAs on the client side. As a result, the security of the Web PKI depends on the weakest CA. Trust heterogeneity and flexibility can be introduced in today’s Web PKI to mitigate the problem. Each client could have different levels of trust in each trusted CA, according to the properties of each CA, such as the location, reputation and scale of the CA. As a result, the loss caused by the compromise of a less trusted CA will be relieved. In this work, we study Flexible-PKI (F-PKI), which is an enhancement of Web PKI, and propose Lite Flexible-PKI (LF-PKI) to address the limitations of F-PKI. LF-PKI is designed to securely and efficiently manage domain policies and enable trust heterogeneity on the client side. The domain owner can issue domain policies for their domains, and the client will have a complete view of the domain policies issued for a specific domain. Based on the collection of domain policies from LF-PKI, trust heterogeneity can be achieved on the client side. Each client will choose the domain policies based on the trust levels of the CA. On the basis of the LF-PKI design, a high-performance implementation of LF-PKI was developed, optimized, and analyzed. The optimized implementation can provide the LF-PKI services for worldwide domains on a single server with moderate hardware. / Dagens Web Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) bygger på en homogen förtroendemodell. Alla certifikatutfärdare (CA) är lika betrodda när de är markerade som betrodda certifikatutfärdare på klientsidan. Som ett resultat beror säkerheten för webb-PKI på den svagaste CA. Förtroendeheterogenitet och flexibilitet kan införas i dagens webb-PKI för att mildra problemet. Varje klient kan ha olika nivåer av förtroende för varje betrodd certifikatutfärdare, beroende på egenskaperna hos varje certifikatutfärdare, såsom certifikatutfärdarens plats, rykte och omfattning. Som ett resultat kommer förlusten som orsakats av kompromissen av en mindre pålitlig CA att avhjälpas. I detta arbete studerar vi Flexible-PKI (F-PKI), som är en förbättring av webb-PKI, och föreslår Lite Flexible-PKI (LF-PKI) för att ta itu med begränsningarna hos F-PKI. LF-PKI är utformad för att säkert och effektivt hantera domänpolicyer och möjliggöra förtroendeheterogenitet på klientsidan. Domänägaren kan utfärda domänpolicyer för sina domäner, och klienten kommer att ha en fullständig bild av domänpolicyerna som utfärdats för en specifik domän. Baserat på insamlingen av domänpolicyer från LF-PKI kan förtroendeheterogenitet uppnås på klientsidan. Varje klient kommer att välja domänpolicyer baserat på förtroendenivåerna för CA. På basis av LF-PKI-designen utvecklades, optimerades och analyserades en högpresterande implementering av LF-PKI. Den optimerade implementeringen kan tillhandahålla LF-PKI-tjänster för världsomspännande domäner på en enda server med måttlig hårdvara.

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education