14,958 research outputs found
Practical service placement approach for microservices architecture
Community networks (CNs) have gained momentum in the last few years with the increasing number of spontaneously deployed WiFi hotspots and home networks. These networks, owned and managed by volunteers, offer various services to their members and to the public. To reduce the complexity of service deployment, community micro-clouds have recently emerged as a promising enabler for the delivery of cloud services to community users. By putting services closer to consumers, micro-clouds pursue not only a better service performance, but also a low entry barrier for the deployment of mainstream Internet services within the CN. Unfortunately, the provisioning of the services is not so simple. Due to the large and irregular topology, high software and hardware diversity of CNs, it requires of aPeer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Web Tracking: Mechanisms, Implications, and Defenses
This articles surveys the existing literature on the methods currently used
by web services to track the user online as well as their purposes,
implications, and possible user's defenses. A significant majority of reviewed
articles and web resources are from years 2012-2014. Privacy seems to be the
Achilles' heel of today's web. Web services make continuous efforts to obtain
as much information as they can about the things we search, the sites we visit,
the people with who we contact, and the products we buy. Tracking is usually
performed for commercial purposes. We present 5 main groups of methods used for
user tracking, which are based on sessions, client storage, client cache,
fingerprinting, or yet other approaches. A special focus is placed on
mechanisms that use web caches, operational caches, and fingerprinting, as they
are usually very rich in terms of using various creative methodologies. We also
show how the users can be identified on the web and associated with their real
names, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, or even street addresses. We show why
tracking is being used and its possible implications for the users (price
discrimination, assessing financial credibility, determining insurance
coverage, government surveillance, and identity theft). For each of the
tracking methods, we present possible defenses. Apart from describing the
methods and tools used for keeping the personal data away from being tracked,
we also present several tools that were used for research purposes - their main
goal is to discover how and by which entity the users are being tracked on
their desktop computers or smartphones, provide this information to the users,
and visualize it in an accessible and easy to follow way. Finally, we present
the currently proposed future approaches to track the user and show that they
can potentially pose significant threats to the users' privacy.Comment: 29 pages, 212 reference
An Empirical Study on Android for Saving Non-shared Data on Public Storage
With millions of apps that can be downloaded from official or third-party
market, Android has become one of the most popular mobile platforms today.
These apps help people in all kinds of ways and thus have access to lots of
user's data that in general fall into three categories: sensitive data, data to
be shared with other apps, and non-sensitive data not to be shared with others.
For the first and second type of data, Android has provided very good storage
models: an app's private sensitive data are saved to its private folder that
can only be access by the app itself, and the data to be shared are saved to
public storage (either the external SD card or the emulated SD card area on
internal FLASH memory). But for the last type, i.e., an app's non-sensitive and
non-shared data, there is a big problem in Android's current storage model
which essentially encourages an app to save its non-sensitive data to shared
public storage that can be accessed by other apps. At first glance, it seems no
problem to do so, as those data are non-sensitive after all, but it implicitly
assumes that app developers could correctly identify all sensitive data and
prevent all possible information leakage from private-but-non-sensitive data.
In this paper, we will demonstrate that this is an invalid assumption with a
thorough survey on information leaks of those apps that had followed Android's
recommended storage model for non-sensitive data. Our studies showed that
highly sensitive information from billions of users can be easily hacked by
exploiting the mentioned problematic storage model. Although our empirical
studies are based on a limited set of apps, the identified problems are never
isolated or accidental bugs of those apps being investigated. On the contrary,
the problem is rooted from the vulnerable storage model recommended by Android.
To mitigate the threat, we also propose a defense framework
The Road Ahead for Networking: A Survey on ICN-IP Coexistence Solutions
In recent years, the current Internet has experienced an unexpected paradigm
shift in the usage model, which has pushed researchers towards the design of
the Information-Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm as a possible replacement of
the existing architecture. Even though both Academia and Industry have
investigated the feasibility and effectiveness of ICN, achieving the complete
replacement of the Internet Protocol (IP) is a challenging task.
Some research groups have already addressed the coexistence by designing
their own architectures, but none of those is the final solution to move
towards the future Internet considering the unaltered state of the networking.
To design such architecture, the research community needs now a comprehensive
overview of the existing solutions that have so far addressed the coexistence.
The purpose of this paper is to reach this goal by providing the first
comprehensive survey and classification of the coexistence architectures
according to their features (i.e., deployment approach, deployment scenarios,
addressed coexistence requirements and architecture or technology used) and
evaluation parameters (i.e., challenges emerging during the deployment and the
runtime behaviour of an architecture). We believe that this paper will finally
fill the gap required for moving towards the design of the final coexistence
architecture.Comment: 23 pages, 16 figures, 3 table
Future wireless applications for a networked city: services for visitors and residents
Future wireless networks will offer near-ubiquitous high-bandwidth communications to mobile users. In addition, the accurate position of users will be known, either through network services or via additional sensing devices such as GPS. These characteristics of future mobile environments will enable the development of location-aware and, more generally, context-sensitive applications. In an attempt to explore the system, application, and user issues associated with the development and deployment of such applications, we began to develop the Lancaster GUIDE system in early 1997, finishing the first phase of the project in 1999. In its entirety, GUIDE comprises a citywide wireless network based on 802.11, a context-sensitive tour guide application with, crucially, significant content, and a set of supporting distributed systems services. Uniquely in the field, GUIDE has been evaluated using members of the general public, and we have gained significant experience in the design of usable context-sensitive applications. We focus on the applications and supporting infrastructure that will form part of GUIDE II, the successor to the GUIDE system. These developments are designed to expand GUIDE outside the tour guide domain, and to provide applications and services for residents of the city of Lancaster, offering a vision of the future mobile environments that will emerge once ubiquitous high-bandwidth coverage is available in most cities
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