A Generic Storage API

We present a generic API suitable for provision of highly generic storage facilities that can be tailored to produce various individually customised storage infrastructures. The paper identifies a candidate set of minimal storage system building blocks, which are sufficiently simple to avoid encapsulating policy where it cannot be customised by applications, and composable to build highly flexible storage architectures. Four main generic components are defined: the store, the namer, the caster and the interpreter. It is hypothesised that these are sufficiently general that they could act as building blocks for any information storage and retrieval system. The essential characteristics of each are defined by an interface, which may be implemented by multiple implementing classes.Comment: Submitted to ACSC 200

ImageJ2: ImageJ for the next generation of scientific image data

ImageJ is an image analysis program extensively used in the biological sciences and beyond. Due to its ease of use, recordable macro language, and extensible plug-in architecture, ImageJ enjoys contributions from non-programmers, amateur programmers, and professional developers alike. Enabling such a diversity of contributors has resulted in a large community that spans the biological and physical sciences. However, a rapidly growing user base, diverging plugin suites, and technical limitations have revealed a clear need for a concerted software engineering effort to support emerging imaging paradigms, to ensure the software's ability to handle the requirements of modern science. Due to these new and emerging challenges in scientific imaging, ImageJ is at a critical development crossroads. We present ImageJ2, a total redesign of ImageJ offering a host of new functionality. It separates concerns, fully decoupling the data model from the user interface. It emphasizes integration with external applications to maximize interoperability. Its robust new plugin framework allows everything from image formats, to scripting languages, to visualization to be extended by the community. The redesigned data model supports arbitrarily large, N-dimensional datasets, which are increasingly common in modern image acquisition. Despite the scope of these changes, backwards compatibility is maintained such that this new functionality can be seamlessly integrated with the classic ImageJ interface, allowing users and developers to migrate to these new methods at their own pace. ImageJ2 provides a framework engineered for flexibility, intended to support these requirements as well as accommodate future needs

Secure Identification in Social Wireless Networks

The applications based on social networking have brought revolution towards social life and are continuously gaining popularity among the Internet users. Due to the advanced computational resources offered by the innovative hardware and nominal subscriber charges of network operators, most of the online social networks are transforming into the mobile domain by offering exciting applications and games exclusively designed for users on the go. Moreover, the mobile devices are considered more personal as compared to their desktop rivals, so there is a tendency among the mobile users to store sensitive data like contacts, passwords, bank account details, updated calendar entries with key dates and personal notes on their devices. The Project Social Wireless Network Secure Identification (SWIN) is carried out at Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS) to explore the practicality of providing the secure mobile social networking portal with advanced security features to tackle potential security threats by extending the existing methods with more innovative security technologies. In addition to the extensive background study and the determination of marketable use-cases with their corresponding security requirements, this thesis proposes a secure identification design to satisfy the security dimensions for both online and offline peers. We have implemented an initial prototype using PHP Socket and OpenSSL library to simulate the secure identification procedure based on the proposed design. The design is in compliance with 3GPP‟s Generic Authentication Architecture (GAA) and our implementation has demonstrated the flexibility of the solution to be applied independently for the applications requiring secure identification. Finally, the thesis provides strong foundation for the advanced implementation on mobile platform in future

Determining Training Needs for Cloud Infrastructure Investigations using I-STRIDE

As more businesses and users adopt cloud computing services, security vulnerabilities will be increasingly found and exploited. There are many technological and political challenges where investigation of potentially criminal incidents in the cloud are concerned. Security experts, however, must still be able to acquire and analyze data in a methodical, rigorous and forensically sound manner. This work applies the STRIDE asset-based risk assessment method to cloud computing infrastructure for the purpose of identifying and assessing an organization's ability to respond to and investigate breaches in cloud computing environments. An extension to the STRIDE risk assessment model is proposed to help organizations quickly respond to incidents while ensuring acquisition and integrity of the largest amount of digital evidence possible. Further, the proposed model allows organizations to assess the needs and capacity of their incident responders before an incident occurs.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures, 3 tables, 5th International Conference on Digital Forensics and Cyber Crime; Digital Forensics and Cyber Crime, pp. 223-236, 201

A Flexible and Secure Deployment Framework for Distributed Applications

This paper describes an implemented system which is designed to support the deployment of applications offering distributed services, comprising a number of distributed components. This is achieved by creating high level placement and topology descriptions which drive tools that deploy applications consisting of components running on multiple hosts. The system addresses issues of heterogeneity by providing abstractions over host-specific attributes yielding a homogeneous run-time environment into which components may be deployed. The run-time environments provide secure binding mechanisms that permit deployed components to bind to stored data and services on the hosts on which they are running.Comment: 2nd International Working Conference on Component Deployment (CD 2004), Edinburgh, Scotlan

Grid-enabled Workflows for Industrial Product Design

This paper presents a generic approach for developing and using Grid-based workflow technology for enabling cross-organizational engineering applications. Using industrial product design examples from the automotive and aerospace industries we highlight the main requirements and challenges addressed by our approach and describe how it can be used for enabling interoperability between heterogeneous workflow engines

Impliance: A Next Generation Information Management Appliance

ably successful in building a large market and adapting to the changes of the last three decades, its impact on the broader market of information management is surprisingly limited. If we were to design an information management system from scratch, based upon today's requirements and hardware capabilities, would it look anything like today's database systems?" In this paper, we introduce Impliance, a next-generation information management system consisting of hardware and software components integrated to form an easy-to-administer appliance that can store, retrieve, and analyze all types of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured information. We first summarize the trends that will shape information management for the foreseeable future. Those trends imply three major requirements for Impliance: (1) to be able to store, manage, and uniformly query all data, not just structured records; (2) to be able to scale out as the volume of this data grows; and (3) to be simple and robust in operation. We then describe four key ideas that are uniquely combined in Impliance to address these requirements, namely the ideas of: (a) integrating software and off-the-shelf hardware into a generic information appliance; (b) automatically discovering, organizing, and managing all data - unstructured as well as structured - in a uniform way; (c) achieving scale-out by exploiting simple, massive parallel processing, and (d) virtualizing compute and storage resources to unify, simplify, and streamline the management of Impliance. Impliance is an ambitious, long-term effort to define simpler, more robust, and more scalable information systems for tomorrow's enterprises.Comment: This article is published under a Creative Commons License Agreement (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/.) You may copy, distribute, display, and perform the work, make derivative works and make commercial use of the work, but, you must attribute the work to the author and CIDR 2007. 3rd Biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR) January 710, 2007, Asilomar, California, US