Security is a primary concern in this era of pervasive computing. Hardware based security mechanisms facilitate the construction of trustworthy secure systems; however, existing hardware security approaches require modifications to the micro-architecture of the processor and such changes are extremely time consuming and expensive to test and implement. Additionally, they incorporate cryptographic security mechanisms that are computationally intensive and account for excessive energy consumption, which significantly degrades the performance of the system. In this dissertation, I explore the domain of hardware based security approaches with an objective to overcome the issues that impede their usability. I have proposed viable solutions to successfully test and implement hardware security mechanisms in real world computing systems. Moreover, with an emphasis on cryptographic memory integrity verification technique and embedded systems as the target application, I have presented energy efficient architectures that considerably reduce the energy consumption of the security mechanisms, thereby improving the performance of the system. The detailed simulation results show that the average energy savings are in the range of 36% to 99% during the memory integrity verification phase, whereas the total power savings of the entire embedded processor are approximately 57%.

The advent of virtualization technologies has evolved the IT infrastructure and organizations are migrating to virtual platforms. Virtualization is also the foundation for cloud platform services. Virtualization is known to provide more security into the infrastructure apart from agility and flexibility. However security aspects of virtualization are often overlooked. Various attacks to the virtualization hypervisor and its administration component are desirable for adversaries. The threats to virtualization must be rigorously scrutinized to realize common breaches and knowing what is more attractive for attackers. In this thesis a current state of perimeter and operational threats along with taxonomy of virtualization security threats is provided. The common attacks based on vulnerability database are investigated. A distribution of the virtualization software vulnerabilities, mapped to the taxonomy is visualized. The famous industry best practices and standards are introduced and key features of each one are presented for safeguarding the virtualization environments. A discussion of other possible approaches to investigate the severity of threats based on automatic systems is presented.

My diploma thesis concerns assessment of the company's information system and the following proposal of amendments. Theoretical part comprises a complex summary of the essential problems related to information systems terminology. In the analytical part, the company is assessed with the analytical methods for detecting the current state. The proposed part of the solution systematically comes out of the analytical part and this section`s main objective is a proposal of innovative information system that will bring higher added value to the company and subsequent economic evaluation of this information system.