Social Media Integration in Video Games: A Social Overlay for Desktop Games

Simpósio de Informática (INForum 2015), Covilhã, Portugal. Notes: Best paper award nominee.The ever increasing popularity of social media makes them a promising source for the personalization of gameplay experiences. Furthermore, involving social network friends in a game can greatly enrich the satisfaction of the player and also attract potential novel players to a game. This paper describes a social overlay designed for desktop games. It allows players to easily capture and share on multiple social networks screenshots, videos and even game-related stories. Unlike most social sharing systems our social overlay is designed to interact with the user in a non-intrusive way allowing him/her to be in complete control of what is shared. Our goal is to make players look and ask for social integration. The development of this social overlay will allow players to take full advantage of their social communities to improve their gaming experience

Access Control Mechanism for IoT Environments Based on Modelling Communication Procedures as Resources

Internet growth has generated new types of services where the use of sensors and actuators is especially remarkable. These services compose what is known as the Internet of Things (IoT). One of the biggest current challenges is obtaining a safe and easy access control scheme for the data managed in these services. We propose integrating IoT devices in an access control system designed for Web-based services by modelling certain IoT communication elements as resources. This would allow us to obtain a unified access control scheme between heterogeneous devices (IoT devices, Internet-based services, etc.). To achieve this, we have analysed the most relevant communication protocols for these kinds of environments and then we have proposed a methodology which allows the modelling of communication actions as resources. Then, we can protect these resources using access control mechanisms. The validation of our proposal has been carried out by selecting a communication protocol based on message exchange, specifically Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT). As an access control scheme, we have selected User-Managed Access (UMA), an existing Open Authorization (OAuth) 2.0 profile originally developed for the protection of Internet services. We have performed tests focused on validating the proposed solution in terms of the correctness of the access control system. Finally, we have evaluated the energy consumption overhead when using our proposal.Ministerio de Economía y CompetitividadUniversidad de Alcal

Every Cloud Has a Push Data Lining: Incorporating Cloud Services in a Context-Aware Application

We investigated context-awareness by utilising multiple sources of context in a mobile device setting. In our experiment we developed a system consisting of a mobile client, running on the Android platform, integrated with a cloud-based service. These components were integrated using pushmessaging technology.One of the key featureswas the automatic adaptation of smartphones in accordance with implicit user needs. The novelty of our approach consists in the use of multiple sources of context input to the system, which included the use of calendar data and web based user configuration tool, as well as that of an external, cloud-based, configuration file storing user interface preferences which, pushed at log-on time irrespective of access device, frees the user from having to manually configure its interface.The systemwas evaluated via two rounds of user evaluations (n = 50 users), the feedback of which was generally positive and demonstrated the viability of using cloud-based services to provide an enhanced context-aware user experience

Swiftmend: Data Synchronization in Open mHealth Applications with Restricted Connectivity

Open mHealth applications often include mobile devices and cloud services with replicated data between components. These replicas need periodical synchronization to remain consistent. However, there are no guarantee of connectivity to networks which do not bill users on the quantity of data usage. This thesis propose Swiftmend, a system with synchronization that minimize the quantity of I/O used on the network. Swiftmend includes two reconciliation algorithms; Rejuvenation and Regrowth. The latter utilizes the efficiency of the Merkle tree data structure to reduce the I/O. Merkle trees can sum up the consistency of replicas into compact fingerprints. While the first reconciliation algorithm, Rejuvenation simply inspects the entire replica to identify consistency. Regrowth is shown to produce less quantity of I/O than Rejuvenation when synchronizing replicas. This is due to the compact fingerprints

Formal Analysis and Verification of OAuth 2.0 in SSO

This thesis examines the OAuth 2.0 protocol within Single Sign-On (SSO) systems through modelling and formal analysis. The versatile Performing Security Proofs of Stateful Protocols (PSPSP), a theory for the Isabelle/HOL proof assistant was used to carry out the verification. Additionally the Open-Source Fixedpoint Model-Checker (OFMC), was used in this verification for its accessibility. PSPSP notably supports the modelling of mutable long-term state, a feature not common in many similar tools. The challenge lies in crafting a model that accurately mirrors real-world scenarios while integrating the OAuth 2.0 protocol on top of the TLS 1.2 protocol. The goal is to produce a model that is both realistic and doesn't induce false attack vectors in its abstraction. The complexity of combining SSO, OAuth, and TLS often necessitates simplifications for effective verification. This study explores the modelling of OAuth components without drastic over-simplifications, verifying each in isolation, and then applying compositional reasoning available in PSPSP/Isabelle to introduce the TLS protocol as well. This process necessitates a well-defined interface between components and verification of all components individually and in the composition. Both tools confirm the lack of detectable vulnerabilities in the OAuth 2.0 protocol, reinforcing its security and prominence in SSO systems. The research explores the process of modelling and formally verifying security protocols, and deepens the understanding of OAuth 2.0's role in SSO systems