114 research outputs found

    Internet Message Access Protocol - Version 4rev1

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    Modeling and Testing Implementations of Protocols with Complex Messages

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    This paper presents a new language called APSL for formally describing protocols to facilitate automated testing. Many real world communication protocols exchange messages whose structures are not trivial, e.g. they may consist of multiple and nested fields, some could be optional, and some may have values that depend on other fields. To properly test implementations of such a protocol, it is not sufficient to only explore different orders of sending and receiving messages. We also need to investigate if the implementation indeed produces correctly formatted messages, and if it responds correctly when it receives different variations of every message type. APSL's main contribution is its sublanguage that is expressive enough to describe complex message formats, both text-based and binary. As an example, this paper also presents a case study where APSL is used to model and test a subset of Courier IMAP email server

    Distributed Key Management for Secure Role Based Messaging

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    Secure Role Based Messaging (SRBM) augments messaging systems with role oriented communication in a secure manner. Role occupants can sign and decrypt messages on behalf of roles. This paper identifies the requirements of SRBM and recognises the need for: distributed key shares, fast membership revocation, mandatory security controls and detection of identity spoofing. A shared RSA scheme is constructed. RSA keys are shared and distributed to role occupants and role gate keepers. Role occupants and role gate keepers must cooperate together to use the key shares to sign and decrypt the messages. Role occupant signatures can be verified by an audit service. A SRBM system architecture is developed to show the security related performance of the proposed scheme, which also demonstrates the implementation of fast membership revocation, mandatory security control and prevention of spoofing. It is shown that the proposed scheme has successfully coupled distributed security with mandatory security controls to realize secure role based messaging

    Evaluation of an Internet Document Delivery Service

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    An Internet-based Document Delivery Service (DDS) has been developed within the framework of the CNR ( the Italian Research National Council) Project BiblioMIME, in order to take advantage of new Internet technologies and promote cooperation among CNR and Italian university libraries. Adopting such technologies changes the traditional organisation of DDS and may drastically reduce costs and delivery times. An information system managing DDS requests and monitoring the temporal evolution of the service has been implemented, running on the local-area network of a test-site library. It aims to track number and types of documents requested and received, user distribution, delivery times and types (surface mail, fax, Internet), to automate repetitive manual procedures and to deal with the various accounting methods used by other libraries. Transmission of documents is carried out by means of an e-mail/Web gateway system supporting document exchange via Internet, which assists receiving libraries in retrieving requested documents. This paper describes the architecture and main design features of the e-mail/Web gateway server (the BiblioMime server). This approach permits librarians to continue using e-mail service to send large documents, while resolving problems that users may encounter when downloading large size files with e-mail agents. The library operator sends the document as an attachment to the destination address; on fly the e-mail server extracts and saves the attachments in a web-server disk file and substitutes them with a new message part that includes an URL pointing to the saved document. The receiver can download these large objects by means of a user-friendly browser. We further discuss the data gathered during the triennium 1998-2000; this consists of about 5,000 DDS transactions per annum with 300 other Italian scientific and bio-medical libraries and commercial document suppliers. Use of the instruments described above allowed us to evaluate the performance of service “before” and “after” the use of Internet Document Delivery and to extract some critical data regarding DDS. Those include: a) libraries with which we have greater numbers of exchanges and their turnaround times; b) extraordinary reduction in costs and delivery times; c) the most frequently requested serial titles (allowing cost-effective decisions on new subscriptions); d) impact on DDS of library participation in consortia which allow user access to greater numbers of online serials

    Email Information Concentrator

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    Elektronpost on üks edukamaid ja enamlevinud rakendusi arvutile, mis kunagi leiutatud. Tänapäeval seisame aga silmitsi üha suureneva info ülekoormuse probleemiga. Käesolev töö on osa teadmushalduse vallas tehtavast uurimistööst eesmärgiga info ülekoormuse probleemiga toime tulla. Töö tulemusena valmiski elektronposti informatsiooni koondaja. Viimase eesmärgiks on elektroonilise kirjakasti sisu allalaadimine ja kindlal viisil parsimine, luues näiteks vastava sisuga graafi või Prologi sisendlaused. Rakendus koosneb kahest osast: meilide kättetoimetamise agent ning kirjakasti parser. Mõlema abstraktse mooduli tarvis on loodud erinevaid teostusi. Olulisemad neist on asünkroonne meilide kättetoimetamise agent, parser kirjakasti sisust kindlaksmääratud omadustega graafi genereerimiseks ning parser elektroonilise postkasti sõnumite konverteerimiseks Prologi lauseteks. Programm on disainitud pidades silmas seda, et uusi realisatsioone oleks lihtne lisada ja liidestada olemasoleva rakendusega, kui vastav vajadus peaks kunagi tekkima. Elektronposti informatsiooni koondaja on kirjutatud programmeerimiskeeles Python. Lisaks kasutati ka järgmisi väliseid teeke: 1) Beautiful Soup - HTML sisu parsimiseks sõnumite sees; 2) NetworkX - emaili graafi loomiseks. Valminud arvutiprogramm suudab täita järgmisi ülesandeid: laadida alla elektrooniline kirjakast meiliserverist, kasutades turvalist IMAP protokolli (IMAP over SSL); leida sõnumite seest emaili päise elemendid ja manuste nimed; eraldada sõnumi sisust seal leiduvad üksikud sõnad, read ja tekstilõigud; genereerida postkasti sisu pealt vastav graaf. Lõigupiiride kindlakstegemiseks töötati välja spetsiaalselt selleks otstarbeks mõeldud lihtne heuristika. Mõeldi välja mudel, kuidas emaili graafina kujutada, püüdes vähendada seejuures andmeliiasust sõnumi osade graafis hoidmisel. Hetkel on rakenduse peamine kasutusala teadmushalduse alastes uurimisprojektides, kus selle abil saab pakkuda teistele tööriistadele sisendinfot. Ehkki valmis reaalselt töötav programm, saab seda oluliselt edasi arendada nii jõudluse kui ka lisavõimaluste poolelt. Prioriteetsemad tööd tuleviku jaoks on näiteks sünkroonse meilide kättetoimetamise agendi loomine osana elektronposti informatsiooni koondajast ning meilide ahelate tuvastamine ja kujutamine graafis. Need ülesanded jäävad tulevikku. Kokkuvõttes võib tööd pidada kordaläinuks, sest saadi valmis töötav rakendus, mida kasutatakse juba ka reaalselt projekti teistes harudes. Näen elektronposti informatsiooni koondajas suurt perspektiivi tuleviku jaoks, kui seda sihipäraselt edasi arendada.Email is one of the most successful and widely used computer applications yet devised. It has been around for decades and is used by individuals as well as organizations all over the globe. However, nowadays we are facing a growing message overload problem. This paper is a part of the corresponding research mainly located in an area called knowledge management with an aim to discover possibilities to handle this problem. As the main outcome of my Bachelor thesis, an application called Email Information Concentrator and a corresponding library were designed and developed. It consists of two abstract modules that operate separately: a mail delivery agent and a mailbox parser. Each abstract module has different implementations. For instance, two different parsers were implemented, one yielding a graph representation of the mailbox and the other corresponding Prolog statements. The program is designed to support new implementations for these modules if the need arises. Two external packages are also used, namely Beautiful Soup and NetworkX, for parsing HTML contents in messages and for the creation of email graphs correspondingly. My library includes tools that can extract message header fields defined by RFC 5322. In addition, it can also extract relevant word, line and paragraph information from the message body. A simple heuristic was developed for the extraction of paragraphs from text/plain and text/html messages. Also, I developed a model for representing an Email Graph. My idea is to keep only unique mail message data parts and create relations for the duplicates. This technique allows to reduce the data duplication. The output of the Email Information Concentrator can be used as an input for further research in related research projects. The Email Information Concentrator will be the base for further works in the information management for emails. Especially the Synchronous Delivery Agent will be one of the next steps. It could make the overall user experience much better and reduce the network load as it will download messages which were changed to since the last time as opposed to fetching the whole mailbox. In addition, reconstructing discussion threads remains a challenging but required task. Finally, many optimizations are still pending to speed up the handling of large-scale mailbox traffic. The Email Information Concentrator has already successfully established itself as an integral part of the knowledge managemant research. Other researchers are using it in their branches for importing and parsing mailboxes

    Unified Messaging using SIP and RTSP

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    Traditional answering machines and voice mail services are closed systems, tightly coupled to a single end system,the local PBX or local exchange carrier. Even simple services, such as forwarding voice mail to another user outside the local system, are hard to provide. With the advent of Internet telephony, we need to provide voice and video mail services. This also offers the opportunity to address some of the shortcomings of existing voice mail systems. We list general requirements for a multimedia mail system for Internet telephony. We then propose an architecture using SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) and RTSP (Real-Time Streaming Protocol) and compare various alternative approaches to solving call forwarding, reclaiming and retrieval of messages. We also briefly describe our prototype implementation

    Evaluation of an Internet Document Delivery Service

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    An Internet-based Document Delivery Service (DDS) has been developed within the framework of the CNR ( the Italian Research National Council) Project BiblioMIME, in order to take advantage of new Internet technologies and promote cooperation among CNR and Italian university libraries. Adopting such technologies changes the traditional organisation of DDS and may drastically reduce costs and delivery times. An information system managing DDS requests and monitoring the temporal evolution of the service has been implemented, running on the local-area network of a test-site library. It aims to track number and types of documents requested and received, user distribution, delivery times and types (surface mail, fax, Internet), to automate repetitive manual procedures and to deal with the various accounting methods used by other libraries. Transmission of documents is carried out by means of an e-mail/Web gateway system supporting document exchange via Internet, which assists receiving libraries in retrieving requested documents. This paper describes the architecture and main design features of the e-mail/Web gateway server (the BiblioMime server). This approach permits librarians to continue using e-mail service to send large documents, while resolving problems that users may encounter when downloading large size files with e-mail agents. The library operator sends the document as an attachment to the destination address; on fly the e-mail server extracts and saves the attachments in a web-server disk file and substitutes them with a new message part that includes an URL pointing to the saved document. The receiver can download these large objects by means of a user-friendly browser. We further discuss the data gathered during the triennium 1998-2000; this consists of about 5,000 DDS transactions per annum with 300 other Italian scientific and bio-medical libraries and commercial document suppliers. Use of the instruments described above allowed us to evaluate the performance of service “before” and “after” the use of Internet Document Delivery and to extract some critical data regarding DDS. Those include: a) libraries with which we have greater numbers of exchanges and their turnaround times; b) extraordinary reduction in costs and delivery times; c) the most frequently requested serial titles (allowing cost-effective decisions on new subscriptions); d) impact on DDS of library participation in consortia which allow user access to greater numbers of online serials
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