Quire: Lightweight Provenance for Smart Phone Operating Systems

Smartphone apps often run with full privileges to access the network and sensitive local resources, making it difficult for remote systems to have any trust in the provenance of network connections they receive. Even within the phone, different apps with different privileges can communicate with one another, allowing one app to trick another into improperly exercising its privileges (a Confused Deputy attack). In Quire, we engineered two new security mechanisms into Android to address these issues. First, we track the call chain of IPCs, allowing an app the choice of operating with the diminished privileges of its callers or to act explicitly on its own behalf. Second, a lightweight signature scheme allows any app to create a signed statement that can be verified anywhere inside the phone. Both of these mechanisms are reflected in network RPCs, allowing remote systems visibility into the state of the phone when an RPC is made. We demonstrate the usefulness of Quire with two example applications. We built an advertising service, running distinctly from the app which wants to display ads, which can validate clicks passed to it from its host. We also built a payment service, allowing an app to issue a request which the payment service validates with the user. An app cannot not forge a payment request by directly connecting to the remote server, nor can the local payment service tamper with the request

‘Searching for District 9 in the Archives: archaeology of a transmedia Campaign’

Film marketing materials have conventionally been regarded as both ephemera and ephemeral but in a digital environment they have become increasingly significant colonising the spaces before, between and beyond the film itself. Indeed the distinctions between promotion and content have become so blurred that, arguably, marketing campaigns have become as entertaining as the films they promote, raising questions about the cultural value of such ephemera. This project set out to examine what transmedia contributes to the narrative ecology of the film and took the award winning campaign designed by the marketing agency, Trigger for Neil Blomkamp’s District 9 (2009) as a starting point. But the research did not get off to an auspicious start because shortly after the project began, the site disappeared. This paper will give an account of a media archaeological excavation to find for District 9’s web campaign. During the search archival sites encountered included institutions set up with the aim of preservation such as the Internet Archive, commercial archives such as the Webby awards as well the ‘new’ generation of web 2.0 archives – a personal blog, YouTube and social media sites. In the light of this, the paper will then reflect on what the German media theorist Wolfgang Ernst referred to as the ‘machine perspective’ and how the mechanisms of the digital archives condition the way we know things about the recent digital past. It will conclude by suggesting that these archival encounters in this research project revealed as much about the nature of digital archives as the film transmediation.Non peer reviewe

LiDAR data management pipeline; from spatial database population to web-application visualization

While the existence of very large and scalable Database Management Systems (DBMSs) is well recognized, it is the usage and extension of these technologies to managing spatial data that has seen increasing amounts of research work in recent years. A focused area of this research work involves the handling of very high resolution Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data. While LiDAR has many real world applications, it is usually the purview of organizations interested in capturing and monitoring our environment where it has become pervasive. In many of these cases, it has now become the de facto minimum standard expected when a need to acquire very detailed 3D spatial data is required. However, significant challenges exist when working with these data sources, from data storage to feature extraction through to data segmentation all presenting challenges relating to the very large volumes of data that exist. In this paper, we present the complete LiDAR data pipeline as managed in our spatial database framework. This involves three distinct sections, populating the database, building a spatial hierarchy that describes the available data sources, and spatially segmenting data based on user requirements which generates a visualization of these data in a WebGL enabled web-application viewer. All work presented is in an experimental results context where we show how this approach is runtime efficient given the very large volumes of LiDAR data that are being managed

Exploring Privacy Leakage from the Resource Usage Patterns of Mobile Apps

Due to the popularity of smart phones and mobile apps, a potential privacy risk with the usage of mobile apps is that, from the usage information of mobile apps (e.g., how many hours a user plays mobile games in each day), private information about a user’s living habits and personal activities can be inferred. To assess this risk, this thesis answers the following research question: can the type of a mobile app (e.g., email, web browsing, mobile game, music streaming, etc.) used by a user be inferred from the resource (e.g., CPU, memory, network, etc.) usage patterns of the mobile app? This thesis answers this question for two kinds of systems, a single mobile device and a mobile cloud computing system. First, two privacy attacks under the same framework are proposed based on supervised learning algorithms. Then these attacks are implemented and explored in a mobile device and in a cloud computing environment. Experimental evaluations show that the type of app can be inferred with high probability. In particular, the attacks achieve up to 100% accuracy on a mobile device, and 66.7% accuracy in the mobile cloud computing environment. This study shows that resource usage patterns of mobile apps can be used to infer the type of apps being used, and thus can cause privacy leakage if not protected

Pemanfaatan Webgis Untuk Pemetaan Persebaran SPBU Di Kota Semarang

Semarang is the fifth largest city after Jakarta, Medan, Surabaya, and Bandung, with a population of nearly two million people. With a dense population, then the distribution of fuel oil (BBM) in the city of Semarang is getting bigger. Therefore, PT. Pertamina as the official agent of the fuel oil supplier is also growing rapidly, thus causing a lot of Gas Station (SPBU) establishment, especially in Semarang.With the development of today's technology, the maps can be created in digital form with the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). In order to be more efficient in its use, then the map is integrated into a web, so users can access them anywhere and anytime. This research was developed using an HTML website framework, the java programming language, PHP, and MySQL with phpMyAdmin features as base data, and GPS handheld as the determinant position coordinate.The final result of this research is GIS application in distribution of Gas Station (SPBU) in Semarang based website which can be accessed on the spbu-semarang.com situs. This website shows the location and the facilities at the Gas Station (SPBU) and served through the google Maps, so can make it easy to find the location of Gas Station (SPBU) in Semarang

Sistem Informasi E-dosir Peserta Pensiun Asuransi (Studi Kasus: PT Asabri (Persero) Cabang Pontianak)

Penelitian ini membahas rancangan sistem informasi e-dosir untuk pendataan kumpulan arsip pemegang polis asuransi pensiunan PT. ASABRI dalam media digital. Permasalahan yang terjadi yaitu pengendalian dosir peserta yang masih harus dilakukan penyesuaian antara data peserta dengan dosir secara konvensional menemukan kendala pada waktu pelayanan. Dengan menggunakan sistem informasi e-dosir, maka Pengelompokan berkas menjadi data digital yang dapat dicari kembali untuk dilihat maupun dicetak dapat meningkatkan waktu layanan kepada peserta. Pengendalian dosir baik yang ada di gudang berkas maupun dengan sistem akan dapat dilakukan, sehingga meningkatkan kinerja dari bidang tertib administrasi kerasipan. Sistem dikembangkan berbasis web agar dapat diakses dilebih satu komputer. Metode penelitian yang digunakan pada perancangan analisa deskriptif kualitatif, sedangkan metode pengembangan perangkat lunak menggunakan Software Development Life Cycle dengan model Waterfall