MobiSnap: managing database snapshots in a mobile environment

This paper presents MobiSnap, a research project that aims to support the development of SQL based applications for mobile environments, providing configurable support for data divergence control and connectivity abstractions. One of the project goals is to assist the migration of legacy SQL based applications into these new operational platforms

The Design of a Web Snapshot Management System for Decision Support Applications

Database snapshots that are defined and/or delivered via the Web are called web snapshots. This paper addresses the requirements for web snapshot management. A web snapshot management system is proposed; its architecture and functions of the major components are described; new commands are defined to perform web snapshot management activities

The Extended Commands for the Management of Database Snapshots for Internet Decision Support Applications

Database snapshots have been an effective way of supporting decision support applications, and will continue to play an important role in providing data in an Intranet decision support environment. This paper discusses the special characteristics of the database snapshot management in an Intranet decision support environment, review the major components involved in the management of snapshots, and then define new commands for the management of snapshots in this environment

The Abandoned Side of the Internet: Hijacking Internet Resources When Domain Names Expire

The vulnerability of the Internet has been demonstrated by prominent IP prefix hijacking events. Major outages such as the China Telecom incident in 2010 stimulate speculations about malicious intentions behind such anomalies. Surprisingly, almost all discussions in the current literature assume that hijacking incidents are enabled by the lack of security mechanisms in the inter-domain routing protocol BGP. In this paper, we discuss an attacker model that accounts for the hijacking of network ownership information stored in Regional Internet Registry (RIR) databases. We show that such threats emerge from abandoned Internet resources (e.g., IP address blocks, AS numbers). When DNS names expire, attackers gain the opportunity to take resource ownership by re-registering domain names that are referenced by corresponding RIR database objects. We argue that this kind of attack is more attractive than conventional hijacking, since the attacker can act in full anonymity on behalf of a victim. Despite corresponding incidents have been observed in the past, current detection techniques are not qualified to deal with these attacks. We show that they are feasible with very little effort, and analyze the risk potential of abandoned Internet resources for the European service region: our findings reveal that currently 73 /24 IP prefixes and 7 ASes are vulnerable to be stealthily abused. We discuss countermeasures and outline research directions towards preventive solutions.Comment: Final version for TMA 201

The Design of a Web Document Snapshots Delivery System

A web document snapshot is a point-in-time capture of its code and the resulting presentation of executing the code. It is used as a way of electronically preserving historical information published in web documents enabling an organization to audit a web document’s contents at a point in the past and perform business analyses with historical information recorded in it. It is also an archived copy of a web document when it is changed. This research develops a system to deliver snapshots of a web document’s static and dynamic contents when it is requested. The system consists of a Database Snapshot Manager for providing database snapshots and a Web Document Snapshot Manager for providing web document snapshots. Algorithms supporting the two managers are presented

Archiving and maintaining curated databases

Curated databases represent a substantial amount of effort by a dedicated group of people to produce a definitive description of some subject area. The value of curated databases lies in the quality of the data that has been manually collected, corrected, and annotated by human curators. Many curated databases are continuously modified and new releases being published on the Web. Given that curated databases act as publications, archiving them becomes a necessity to enable retrieval of particular database versions. A system trying to archive evolving databases on the Web faces several challenges. First and foremost, the systems needs to be able to effciently maintain and query multiple snapshots of ever growing databases. Second, the system needs to be flexible enough to account for changes to the database structure and to handle data of varying quality. Third, the system needs to be robust and invulnerable to local failure to allow reliable long-term preservation of archived information. Our archive management system XArch addresses the first challenge by providing the functionality to maintain, populate, and query archives of database snapshots in hierarchical format. This presentation intends to give an overview of our ongoing efforts of improving XArch regarding (i) archiving evolving databases, (ii) supporting distributed archives, and (iii) using our archives and XArch as the basis of a system to create, maintain, and publish curated databases