DESIGNING A FRAMEWORK FOR RESTFUL MULTI-AGENT SYSTEMS

Nowadays there are many systems that require some degree of automation. To attain this automation, agent technology has generally been found to be a promising approach. An agent is a piece of software that does activities on behalf of a user or another program. However, designing and deploying an agent infrastructure that achieves scalability is still a major challenge. In this thesis, a pattern for designing agents following RESTful principles is proposed in an effort to address the aforementioned challenges. In addition, the pattern will follow the FIPA Abstract Architecture; which is aimed at developing intelligent agents and supporting interoperability among agents and agent-based systems. Furthermore, an evaluation is done to investigate the scalability of the deployment of a RESTful multi-agent system

Websocket-protokollan tietoturva selainsovelluksissa

Tämä tutkielma tutustuttaa lukijan yleisimpiin verkkoprotokolliin ja esittelee websocket-protokollan. Websocket-teknologiaa kokonaisuutena esitellään ja vertaillaan muihin verkkosovelluksissa käytettyihin teknologioihin. Lisäksi websocket-teknologiaa analysoidaan tietoturvan näkökulmasta. Tietoturva-analyysin pohjalta todetaan, että yleiset verkkosivuhaavoittuvuudet mahdollistavat websocket-yhteyden kaappaamisen, jolloin ulkopuolinen osapuoli saa täydet luku- ja kirjoitusoikeudet yhteyteen. Websocketin hallinta mahdollistaa uusia verkkohyökkäyksiä. Yhteyden kaappaamisen estämiseksi ja verkkohyökkäysten lieventämiseksi ehdotetaan erilaisia keinoja

ENABLING MOBILE DEVICES TO HOST CONSUMERS AND PROVIDERS OF RESTFUL WEB SERVICES

The strong growth in the use of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets in Enterprise Information Systems has led to growing research in the area of mobile Web services. Web services are applications that are developed based on network standards such as Services Oriented Architecture and Representational State Transfer (REST). The mobile research community mostly focused on facilitating the mobile devices as client consumers especially in heterogeneous Web services. However, with the advancement in mobile device capabilities in terms of processing power and storage, this thesis seeks to utilize these devices as hosts of REST Web services. In order to host services on mobile devices, some key challenges have to be addressed. Since data and services accessibility is facilitated by the mobile devices which communicate via unstable wireless networks, the challenges of network latency and synchronization of data (i.e. the Web resources) among the mobile participants must be addressed. To address these challenges, this thesis proposes a cloud-based middleware that enables reliable communication between the mobile hosts in unreliable Wi-Fi networks. The middleware employs techniques such as message routing and Web resources state changes detection in order to push data to the mobile participants in real time. Additionally, to ensure high availability of data, the proposed middleware has a cache component which stores the replicas of the mobile hosts’ Web resources. As a result, in case a mobile host is disconnected, the Web resources of the host can be accessed on the middleware. The key contributions of this thesis are the identification of mobile devices as hosts of RESTful Web services and the implementation of middleware frameworks that support mobile communication in unreliable networks