The VITI program: Final Report

In this report we present our findings and results from the VITI program in 2000. The focus of the research work undertaken by VITI has been to provide electronic meeting environments that are easy to use and afford as natural a collaboration experience as possible. This final report is structured into three parts. Part one concerns the VITI infrastructure and consists of two sections. The first section describes the process of establishing the infrastructure, concentrating on how the work was done. The second section presents the actual infrastructure that is in place today, concentrating on what has been put in place. Part two examines the use the VITI infrastructure has been put to, giving examples of activities it has supported and discussing strengths and weaknesses that have emerged through this use. Finally part three considers the future of distributed electronic meeting environments. It is recommended that the report be read in the order in which it is presented. However, each section has been written as a standalone document and can be read independently of the others

A Secure Group Communication Architecture for a Swarm of Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

This thesis investigates the application of a secure group communication architecture to a swarm of autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). A multicast secure group communication architecture for the low earth orbit (LEO) satellite environment is evaluated to determine if it can be effectively adapted to a swarm of UAVs and provide secure, scalable, and efficient communications. The performance of the proposed security architecture is evaluated with two other commonly used architectures using a discrete event computer simulation developed using MatLab. Performance is evaluated in terms of the scalability and efficiency of the group key distribution and management scheme when the swarm size, swarm mobility, multicast group join and departure rates are varied. The metrics include the total keys distributed over the simulation period, the average number of times an individual UAV must rekey, the average bandwidth used to rekey the swarm, and the average percentage of battery consumed by a UAV to rekey over the simulation period. The proposed security architecture can successfully be applied to a swarm of autonomous UAVs using current technology. The proposed architecture is more efficient and scalable than the other tested and commonly-used architectures. Over all the tested configurations, the proposed architecture distributes 55.2 – 94.8% fewer keys, rekeys 59.0 - 94.9% less often per UAV, uses 55.2 - 87.9% less bandwidth to rekey, and reduces the battery consumption by 16.9 – 85.4%

Proceedings of Abstracts Engineering and Computer Science Research Conference 2019

© 2019 The Author(s). This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. For further details please see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Note: Keynote: Fluorescence visualisation to evaluate effectiveness of personal protective equipment for infection control is © 2019 Crown copyright and so is licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Under this licence users are permitted to copy, publish, distribute and transmit the Information; adapt the Information; exploit the Information commercially and non-commercially for example, by combining it with other Information, or by including it in your own product or application. Where you do any of the above you must acknowledge the source of the Information in your product or application by including or linking to any attribution statement specified by the Information Provider(s) and, where possible, provide a link to this licence: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/This book is the record of abstracts submitted and accepted for presentation at the Inaugural Engineering and Computer Science Research Conference held 17th April 2019 at the University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK. This conference is a local event aiming at bringing together the research students, staff and eminent external guests to celebrate Engineering and Computer Science Research at the University of Hertfordshire. The ECS Research Conference aims to showcase the broad landscape of research taking place in the School of Engineering and Computer Science. The 2019 conference was articulated around three topical cross-disciplinary themes: Make and Preserve the Future; Connect the People and Cities; and Protect and Care

Satellite Networks: Architectures, Applications, and Technologies

Since global satellite networks are moving to the forefront in enhancing the national and global information infrastructures due to communication satellites' unique networking characteristics, a workshop was organized to assess the progress made to date and chart the future. This workshop provided the forum to assess the current state-of-the-art, identify key issues, and highlight the emerging trends in the next-generation architectures, data protocol development, communication interoperability, and applications. Presentations on overview, state-of-the-art in research, development, deployment and applications and future trends on satellite networks are assembled

End-to-end security in active networks

Active network solutions have been proposed to many of the problems caused by the increasing heterogeneity of the Internet. These ystems allow nodes within the network to process data passing through in several ways. Allowing code from various sources to run on routers introduces numerous security concerns that have been addressed by research into safe languages, restricted execution environments, and other related areas. But little attention has been paid to an even more critical question: the effect on end-to-end security of active flow manipulation. This thesis first examines the threat model implicit in active networks. It develops a framework of security protocols in use at various layers of the networking stack, and their utility to multimedia transport and flow processing, and asks if it is reasonable to give active routers access to the plaintext of these flows. After considering the various security problem introduced, such as vulnerability to attacks on intermediaries or coercion, it concludes not. We then ask if active network systems can be built that maintain end-to-end security without seriously degrading the functionality they provide. We describe the design and analysis of three such protocols: a distributed packet filtering system that can be used to adjust multimedia bandwidth requirements and defend against denial-of-service attacks; an efficient composition of link and transport-layer reliability mechanisms that increases the performance of TCP over lossy wireless links; and a distributed watermarking servicethat can efficiently deliver media flows marked with the identity of their recipients. In all three cases, similar functionality is provided to designs that do not maintain end-to-end security. Finally, we reconsider traditional end-to-end arguments in both networking and security, and show that they have continuing importance for Internet design. Our watermarking work adds the concept of splitting trust throughout a network to that model; we suggest further applications of this idea

Class control: An adaptable and self configuring classroom control system

Class Control is a tool that was created at the University of St Andrews to allow a teacher to not only view all of the screens in a classroom at once but also take control of them and broadcast the teacher’s screen to them. Existing software wouldn’t allow the scalability to meet the demands of the size of the classroom so Class Control was developed and is still used by the school today.%0d%0aHowever, this tool was created to be used in one classroom just running the Mac OS. This thesis project aimed to add the ability to move this tool out of the classroom and be able to configure itself in a new classroom containing machines with other operating systems that can run Java.%0d%0aClass Control has now been extended to learn about a new environment it is in and use this information to help improve future runs of the tool. Previous configurations can be stored permitting a teacher to select a configuration that suits their needs and Class Control can also recommend a configuration depending on what clients it sees in the environment. Class Control can also be used to view and control Linux, Windows and Mac OS at the same time

DIVE on the internet

This dissertation reports research and development of a platform for Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs). It has particularly focused on two major challenges: supporting the rapid development of scalable applications and easing their deployment on the Internet. This work employs a research method based on prototyping and refinement and promotes the use of this method for application development. A number of the solutions herein are in line with other CVE systems. One of the strengths of this work consists in a global approach to the issues raised by CVEs and the recognition that such complex problems are best tackled using a multi-disciplinary approach that understands both user and system requirements. CVE application deployment is aided by an overlay network that is able to complement any IP multicast infrastructure in place. Apart from complementing a weakly deployed worldwide multicast, this infrastructure provides for a certain degree of introspection, remote controlling and visualisation. As such, it forms an important aid in assessing the scalability of running applications. This scalability is further facilitated by specialised object distribution algorithms and an open framework for the implementation of novel partitioning techniques. CVE application development is eased by a scripting language, which enables rapid development and favours experimentation. This scripting language interfaces many aspects of the system and enables the prototyping of distribution-related components as well as user interfaces. It is the key construct of a distributed environment to which components, written in different languages, connect and onto which they operate in a network abstracted manner. The solutions proposed are exemplified and strengthened by three collaborative applications. The Dive room system is a virtual environment modelled after the room metaphor and supporting asynchronous and synchronous cooperative work. WebPath is a companion application to a Web browser that seeks to make the current history of page visits more visible and usable. Finally, the London travel demonstrator supports travellers by providing an environment where they can explore the city, utilise group collaboration facilities, rehearse particular journeys and access tourist information data