An implementation and analysis of the Abstract Syntax Notation One and the basic encoding rules

The details of abstract syntax notation one standard (ASN.1) and the basic encoding rules standard (BER) that collectively solve the problem of data transfer across incompatible host environments are presented, and a compiler that was built to automate their use is described. Experiences with this compiler are also discussed which provide a quantitative analysis of the performance costs associated with the application of these standards. An evaluation is offered as to how well suited ASN.1 and BER are in solving the common data representation problem

Digital certificates and threshold cryptography

This dissertation discusses the use of secret sharing cryptographic protocols for distributing and sharing of secret documents, in our case PDF documents. We discuss the advantages and uses of such a system in the context of collaborative environments. Description of the cryptographic protocol involved and the necessary Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) shall be presented. We also provide an implementation of this framework as a “proof of concept” and fundament the use of a certificate extension as the basis for threshold cryptography. Details of the shared secret distribution protocol and shared secret recovery protocol shall be given as well as the associated technical implementation details. The actual secret sharing algorithm implemented at this stage is based on an existing well known secret sharing scheme that uses polynomial interpolation over a finite field. Finally we conclude with a practical assessment of our prototype

Comparing the Performance of SNMP and Web Services-Based Management

his paper compares the performance of Web services based network monitoring to traditional, SNMP based, monitoring. The study focuses on the ifTable, and investigates performance as function of the number of retrieved objects. The following aspects are examined: bandwidth usage, CPU time, memory consumption and round trip delay. For our study several prototypes of Web services based agents were implemented; these prototypes can retrieve single ifTable elements, ifTable rows, ifTable columns or the entire ifTable. This paper presents a generic formula to calculate SNMP’s bandwidth requirements; the bandwidth consumption of our prototypes was compared to that formula. The CPU time, memory consumption and round trip delay of our prototypes was compared to Net-SNMP, as well as several other SNMP agents. Our measurements show that SNMP is more efficient in cases where only a single object is retrieved; for larger number of objects Web services may be more efficient. Our study also shows that, if performance is the issue, the choice between BER (SNMP) or XML (Web services) encoding is generally not the determining factor; other choices can have stronger impact on performance