Ground Systems Development Environment (GSDE) interface requirements analysis: Operations scenarios

This report is a preliminary assessment of the functional and data interface requirements to the link between the GSDE GS/SPF (Amdahl) and the Space Station Control Center (SSCC) and Space Station Training Facility (SSTF) Integration, Verification, and Test Environments (IVTE's). These interfaces will be involved in ground software development of both the control center and the simulation and training systems. Our understanding of the configuration management (CM) interface and the expected functional characteristics of the Amdahl-IVTE interface is described. A set of assumptions and questions that need to be considered and resolved in order to complete the interface functional and data requirements definitions are presented. A listing of information items defined to describe software configuration items in the GSDE CM system is included. It also includes listings of standard reports of CM information and of CM-related tools in the GSDE

Method, System, and Computer program product for transaction authentication

Methods, systems, and computer program products for transaction authentication may use a mobile phone number as a consumer identifier to trigger transaction authentication inside a trusted mobile application. A consumer may select a payment device associated with the application at an e-commerce website, enter the mobile phone number, and in response thereto, receive a notification on a mobile phone associated with the application. The consumer reviews the transaction details and approves the transaction via the application using biometrics and/or a personal identification number (PIN)

Network-Assisted Handover for Heterogeneous Wireless Networks using IEEE 802.21

The IEEE 802.21 is a standard for enabling handover in heterogeneous wireless networks. Published in January 2009, it defines protocols and messages for mobile-to-node and node-to-node communication in a technology-neutral and flexible manner. The need arises because of the widespread diffusion of different technologies for wireless communications (e.g., WiFi, WiMAX, LTE) coexisting in the same geographical area. Even though the number of multi-radio multi-technology mobile devices is increasing significantly, there are no open solutions in the market to enable efficient inter-technology handover. As is often the case with communication standards, the structure of the required components, the procedures, and the algorithms are left unspecified by the IEEE 802.21 standard so as to promote competion by differentiation of equipment capabilities and services. The contribution of this thesis is two-fold: i) a design and an implemenation of the Media Independent Information Service (MIIS) server; and, ii) a solution to enable network-assisted handover using the IEEE 802.21 standard, aimed at reducing the handover latency and the energy consumption of mobile devices due to scanning. The MIIS server has been fully implemented in C++ under Linux. In order to perform testbed evaluations, all the required components have been implemented, as well, within an open source framework for IEEE 802.21 called ODTONE. Modifications to the latter have been performed for optimization and fine tuning, and for extending those functional modules needed but not fully implemented. For a realistic evaluation, Linux-based embedded COTS devices have been used, equipped with multiple IEEE 802.11a and IEEE 802.11g wireless network interface cards. This has required additional development for kernel/user space binding and hardware control. Testbed results are reported to show the effectiveness of the proposed solution, also proving the MIIS server scalability

Hadoop performance modeling and job optimization for big data analytics

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonBig data has received a momentum from both academia and industry. The MapReduce model has emerged into a major computing model in support of big data analytics. Hadoop, which is an open source implementation of the MapReduce model, has been widely taken up by the community. Cloud service providers such as Amazon EC2 cloud have now supported Hadoop user applications. However, a key challenge is that the cloud service providers do not a have resource provisioning mechanism to satisfy user jobs with deadline requirements. Currently, it is solely the user responsibility to estimate the require amount of resources for their job running in a public cloud. This thesis presents a Hadoop performance model that accurately estimates the execution duration of a job and further provisions the required amount of resources for a job to be completed within a deadline. The proposed model employs Locally Weighted Linear Regression (LWLR) model to estimate execution time of a job and Lagrange Multiplier technique for resource provisioning to satisfy user job with a given deadline. The performance of the propose model is extensively evaluated in both in-house Hadoop cluster and Amazon EC2 Cloud. Experimental results show that the proposed model is highly accurate in job execution estimation and jobs are completed within the required deadlines following on the resource provisioning scheme of the proposed model. In addition, the Hadoop framework has over 190 configuration parameters and some of them have significant effects on the performance of a Hadoop job. Manually setting the optimum values for these parameters is a challenging task and also a time consuming process. This thesis presents optimization works that enhances the performance of Hadoop by automatically tuning its parameter values. It employs Gene Expression Programming (GEP) technique to build an objective function that represents the performance of a job and the correlation among the configuration parameters. For the purpose of optimization, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is employed to find automatically an optimal or a near optimal configuration settings. The performance of the proposed work is intensively evaluated on a Hadoop cluster and the experimental results show that the proposed work enhances the performance of Hadoop significantly compared with the default settings.Abdul Wali Khan University Marda

An application of an ethernet based protocol for communication and control in automated manufacturing

The exchange of information in the industrial environment is essential in order to achieve complete integration and control of manufacturing processes. At present the majority of devices present in the shop floor environment are still used as stand alone machines. They do not take advantage of the possibilities offered by a communication link to improve the manufacturing process. The subject of this research has been centered on the development of a simple, flexible and inexpensive support system for communication and control of manufacturing processes. As a result, a system with these features has been proposed and implemented on a simulated workcell. The area footwear manufacturing was chosen for modelling the workcell. The components of the manufacturing support system were developed using an object oriented approach which allowed modularity and software reuse. In order to achieve communication between the components, a communication protocol was developed following the process defined in the rapid protocol implementation framework. Ethernet was selected for implementing the lower levels of the protocol. Java, a new object oriented programming language used for the implementation of the system, showed that it could became a promising language for the implementation of manufacturing applications. In particular the platform independence feature of the language allows the immediate porting of applications to systems with different features. The manufacturing cell simulation had shown that the times associated with the manufacturing support system operations are compatible for its use in applications where the response times are in the order of one second

MINING SECURE BEHAVIOR OF HARDWARE DESIGNS

Hardware presents an enticing target for attackers attempting to gain access to a secured com-puter system. Software-only exploits of hardware vulnerabilities may bypass software level secu-rity features. Hardware must be made secure. However, to understand whether a hardware designis secure, security specifications must be generated to define security on that design. Micro-architectural design elements, undocumented or under-documented features, debug interfaces,and information–flow side channels all may introduce new vulnerabilities. The secure behaviorof each must be specified in order ensure the design meets its security requirements and containsno vulnerabilities. However, manual efforts can be overwhelmed by design complexity, and manyhardware vulnerabilities, such as Memory Sinkhole, SYSRET privilege escalation, and mostrecently Spectre/Meltdown, persisted in product lines for decades despite extensive testing. Anautomated solution is needed to specify secure designs.Specification mining offers a solution by automating security specification for hardware.Specification miners use a form of machine learning to specify behaviors of a system by studyinga system in execution. However, specification mining was first developed for use with software.Complex hardware designs offer unique challenges for this technique. Further, specificationminers traditionally capture functional specifications without a notion of security, and may notuse the specification logics necessary to describe some security requirements.This work demonstrates specification mining for hardware security. On CISC architecturessuch as x86, I demonstrate that a miner partitioning the design state space along control signalsdiscovers a specification that includes manually defined properties and, if followed, would secureCPU designs against Memory Sinkhole and SYSRET privilege escalation. For temporal prop-erties, I demonstrate that a miner using security specific linear temporal logic (LTL) templatesfor specification detection may find properties that, if followed, would secure designs againsthistorical documented security vulnerabilities and against potential future attacks targeting sys-tem initialization. For information–flow hyperproperties, I demonstrate that a miner may useInformation Flow Tracking (IFT) to develop output properties containing designer specifiedinformation–flow security properties as well as properties that demonstrate a design does notcontain certain Common Weakness Enumerations (CWEs).Doctor of Philosoph

Farmers mobile application for ordering inputs and marketing produce

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Mobile Telecommunications and Innovation (MSc. MTI) at Strathmore UniversityFarming operations experience long agricultural supply chain every day. These long chains include, but not limited to very long processes of getting desired farm inputs and reaching the actual market for produce leading to excessive price abuse. In a small-scale farming setup, a farmer cannot access direct input and even sell their produce to the right market other than to depend on middle-men, brokers, who do not give them fair dues and thus the overall value of the farming becomes un-profitable. The current small-holder farming setup do not explicitly consider commercial farming and majorly concentrate on subsistence farming yet there is enough potential to go commercial. This dissertation investigated the agricultural supply chain process. It was done by considering the challenges faced by farmers, especially small holder during start of farming, nurturing and selling produce. Further the current solutions used to get inputs and sale of produce were considered and a suitable solution designed, developed, tested and validated to ensure that it solved these challenges. Data was collected from existing records of farmers input per season, produce gathered and sold. The data collected was used as input to an Android mobile application for farmers to order inputs and sell produce. Scrum Agile Development methodology was adopted as the software methodology for developing the solution. A proof of concept mobile application was adopted to make farm input orders and sell produce. Testing was conducted by the several farmers who were registered in the platform and a setup place in Eldoret town

Web services - agent based model for inter-enterprise collaboration

Web Services technology is an emerging paradigm in establishing a standard environment for legacy applications integration over the Internet. Using Web services and related technologies facilitate the implementation of a virtual enterprise across heterogeneous software platforms. However, Web services suffer from some shortcomings fulfilling requirements of setting up a reactive and autonomous collaboration among enterprises. The current technology' of Web services registry, known as UDDI, is in its infancy stage. The aim of this work is to integrate intelligent software agents and Web services in order to apply them to create a collaborative environment. We s ta rt with describing the concepts of virtual enterprise, Web services, and software agents as well as their requirements, problems, and benefits. To this extent, we identify the existing problems w ith Web services technology and discuss the feasibility of using software agents and their abilities to prevail those difficulties. This thesis proposes a Web services / agent-based model for both the internal architecture of an individual enterprise and the UDDI registry as well. We define a multi-agent model in different levels of enterprise’s system architecture to accomplish a suitable selection of a registered service, to check the status of a process, to realize users’ requests, and to react to them in a collaborative way with other agent-based Web services. Moreover, the thesis proposes a multi-agent model to define a dynamic workflow capable of coordinating and monitoring the processes defined in the workflows