Secure Architectures for Mobile Applications

The paper presents security issues and architectures for mobile applications and GSM infrastructure. The article also introduces the idea of a new secure architecture for an inter-sector electronic wallet used in payments - STP4EW (Secure Transmission Protocol for Electronic Wallet)secure architecture, m-application, smart-cards, 3G Mobile

The Transitivity of Trust Problem in the Interaction of Android Applications

Mobile phones have developed into complex platforms with large numbers of installed applications and a wide range of sensitive data. Application security policies limit the permissions of each installed application. As applications may interact, restricting single applications may create a false sense of security for the end users while data may still leave the mobile phone through other applications. Instead, the information flow needs to be policed for the composite system of applications in a transparent and usable manner. In this paper, we propose to employ static analysis based on the software architecture and focused data flow analysis to scalably detect information flows between components. Specifically, we aim to reveal transitivity of trust problems in multi-component mobile platforms. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach with Android applications, although the generalization of the analysis to similar composition-based architectures, such as Service-oriented Architecture, can also be explored in the future

Can mobile eco-systems for technical innovations be standardized? The case of mobile wallets and contactless communication

This paper puts focus on the application of Near Field Communication technology (NFC) to mobile payments. Uncertainties about global policies open for a variety of local business policies. Taking into account different representations of actor interaction as described by different eco-systems by different policy forums the main research question to be discussed in the paper is: Can policies or standards describing actor roles and responsibilities for technical innovations like mobile payments remove obstacles for introduction of the innovation? Different types of industry forums are not only involved in strictly technical matters but also discuss and describe visions about how a new technique might be applied in business life. They suggest different business architectures, (not only a technical architecture), where roles of different type of actors and relations between actors are outlined based on ideas about so called eco-systems. Against this background the paper first discusses how NFC enabled mobile payments currently attracts a lot of attention and identifies four possible development paths making it happen. The paper discusses and compares how global policy networks describe the technical and business architectures for mobile payments. The paper uses a business practice analytical framework and an industrial network framework to identify major problems in connecting global and local policies. Some comments on further research finalize the paper. --Near Field Communication,mobile payments,global policy,business architecture,policy forum,industrial networks,practice

A Reconfigurable Outer Modem Platform for Future Communications Systems

Future mobile and wireless communications networks require flexible modem architectures with high performance. Efficient utilization of application specific flexibility is key to fulfill these requirements. For high throughput a single processor can not provide the necessary computational power. Hence multi-processor architectures become necessary. This paper presents a multi-processor platform based on a new dynamically reconfigurable application specific instruction set processor (dr-ASIP) for the application domain of channel decoding. Inherently parallel decoding tasks can be mapped onto individual processing nodes. The implied challenging inter-processor communication is efficiently handled by a Network-on-Chip (NoC) such that the throughput of each node is not degraded. The dr-ASIP features Viterbi and Log-MAP decoding for support of convolutional and turbo codes of more than 10 currently specified mobile and wireless standards. Furthermore, its flexibility allows for adaptation to future systems

A demonstration case on the transformation of software architectures for service specification

This paper presents a demonstration case on the successive application of a model-based technique to assist on the refinement of software logical architectures. The technique is essentially based on the transformation of use cases into object diagrams. The applicability of the technique is illustrated by presenting some results from a mobile application. For mobile software, the definition of the underlying service-oriented architecture must consider as user requirements the services themselves, the mobile operators entry points and the final clients interfaces, and use them to characterize the platform. Within the presented demonstration case, the specification of one service of the mobile application was obtained by successively applying the technique.Research funded by FCT and FEDER under project STACOS (POSI/CHS/48875/2002)

Octopus - an energy-efficient architecture for wireless multimedia systems

Multimedia computing and mobile computing are two trends that will lead to a new application domain in the near future. However, the technological challenges to establishing this paradigm of computing are non-trivial. Personal mobile computing offers a vision of the future with a much richer and more exciting set of architecture research challenges than extrapolations of the current desktop architectures. In particular, these devices will have limited battery resources, will handle diverse data types, and will operate in environments that are insecure, dynamic and which vary significantly in time and location. The approach we made to achieve such a system is to use autonomous, adaptable modules, interconnected by a switch rather than by a bus, and to offload as much as work as possible from the CPU to programmable modules that is placed in the data streams. A reconfigurable internal communication network switch called Octopus exploits locality of reference and eliminates wasteful data copies

A generic communication architecture for end to end mobility management in the Internet

The proliferation of laptops, cellular phones, and other mobile computing platforms connected to the Internet has triggered numerous research works into mobile networking. The increasingly dense set of wireless access networks that can be potentially accessed by mobile users open the door to an era of pervasive computing. However, the puzzle of wireless access networks that tends to become the natural access networks to the Internet pushes legacy“wireoriented” communication architectures to their limit. Indeed, there is a critical gap between the increasingly used stream centric multimedia applications and the incapacity of legacy communication stacks to insure the continuity of these multimedia sessions for mobile users. This paper proposes a generic communication architecture (i.e. not dedicated to a specific protocol or technology) that aims to fill the gap between the application layer continuity needs and the discontinuity of the communication service inherent to the physical layer of wireless mobile networks. This paper introduces an end to end communication architecture that preserves efficiently session continuity in the context of mobile and wireless networks. This architecture is mainly based on end to end mechanisms that could be integrated into a new generation reconfigurable transport protocol. The proposed contribution efficiently satisfies mobility requirements such as efficient location management, fast handover, and continuous connection support