Web API Fragility: How Robust is Your Web API Client

Web APIs provide a systematic and extensible approach for application-to-application interaction. A large number of mobile applications makes use of web APIs to integrate services into apps. Each Web API's evolution pace is determined by their respective developer and mobile application developers are forced to accompany the API providers in their software evolution tasks. In this paper we investigate whether mobile application developers understand and how they deal with the added distress of web APIs evolving. In particular, we studied how robust 48 high profile mobile applications are when dealing with mutated web API responses. Additionally, we interviewed three mobile application developers to better understand their choices and trade-offs regarding web API integration.Comment: Technical repor

MoPS: A Modular Protection Scheme for Long-Term Storage

Current trends in technology, such as cloud computing, allow outsourcing the storage, backup, and archiving of data. This provides efficiency and flexibility, but also poses new risks for data security. It in particular became crucial to develop protection schemes that ensure security even in the long-term, i.e. beyond the lifetime of keys, certificates, and cryptographic primitives. However, all current solutions fail to provide optimal performance for different application scenarios. Thus, in this work, we present MoPS, a modular protection scheme to ensure authenticity and integrity for data stored over long periods of time. MoPS does not come with any requirements regarding the storage architecture and can therefore be used together with existing archiving or storage systems. It supports a set of techniques which can be plugged together, combined, and migrated in order to create customized solutions that fulfill the requirements of different application scenarios in the best possible way. As a proof of concept we implemented MoPS and provide performance measurements. Furthermore, our implementation provides additional features, such as guidance for non-expert users and export functionalities for external verifiers.Comment: Original Publication (in the same form): ASIACCS 201

Report on the XBase Project

This project addressed the conceptual fundamentals of data storage, investigating techniques for provision of highly generic storage facilities that can be tailored to produce various individually customised storage infrastructures, compliant to the needs of particular applications. This requires the separation of mechanism and policy wherever possible. Aspirations include: actors, whether users or individual processes, should be able to bind to, update and manipulate data and programs transparently with respect to their respective locations; programs should be expressed independently of the storage and network technology involved in their execution; storage facilities should be structure-neutral so that actors can impose multiple interpretations over information, simultaneously and safely; information should not be discarded so that arbitrary historical views are supported; raw stored information should be open to all; where security restrictions on its use are required this should be achieved using cryptographic techniques. The key advances of the research were: 1) the identification of a candidate set of minimal storage system building blocks, which are sufficiently simple to avoid encapsulating policy where it cannot be customised by applications, and composable to build highly flexible storage architectures 2) insight into the nature of append-only storage components, and the issues arising from their application to common storage use-cases

The National Transport Data Framework

Report by Professor Peter Landshoff (Cambridge University) and Professor John Polak (Imperial College London) on a project for the Department for Transport. emails: [email protected] [email protected] NTDF is designed to be a resource for data owners to deposit descriptions into a central catalogue, so that people can search for data and find data and understand their characteristics. The value of this is to individuals, to commercial organizations, and to public bodies. For example, services that provide better information to travellers will help to make their journey less stressful and persuade them to make more use of public transport. Transport operators need very diverse information to help them plan developments to their services: demographic, geographical, economic etc. And policy makers need a similar range of information to help them decide how to divide their budget and afterwards to evaluate how valuable it has been.This work was supported by the Department for Transport (DfT)

Type-Based Detection of XML Query-Update Independence

This paper presents a novel static analysis technique to detect XML query-update independence, in the presence of a schema. Rather than types, our system infers chains of types. Each chain represents a path that can be traversed on a valid document during query/update evaluation. The resulting independence analysis is precise, although it raises a challenging issue: recursive schemas may lead to infer infinitely many chains. A sound and complete approximation technique ensuring a finite analysis in any case is presented, together with an efficient implementation performing the chain-based analysis in polynomial space and time.Comment: VLDB201

Some issues in the 'archaeology' of software evolution

During a software project's lifetime, the software goes through many changes, as components are added, removed and modified to fix bugs and add new features. This paper is intended as a lightweight introduction to some of the issues arising from an `archaeological' investigation of software evolution. We use our own work to look at some of the challenges faced, techniques used, findings obtained, and lessons learnt when measuring and visualising the historical changes that happen during the evolution of software

Some issues in the 'archaeology' of software evolution

During a software project's lifetime, the software goes through many changes, as components are added, removed and modified to fix bugs and add new features. This paper is intended as a lightweight introduction to some of the issues arising from an `archaeological' investigation of software evolution. We use our own work to look at some of the challenges faced, techniques used, findings obtained, and lessons learnt when measuring and visualising the historical changes that happen during the evolution of software

Plagiarism Checker

The Turnitin Plagiarism Checker App is a program that helps users to check their written content for plagiarism. This project is important because plagiarism is a major issue in academia and other fields, where it can lead to academic misconduct, professional repercussions, and legal issues. This application is designed to solve the problem of plagiarism by making it easier for users to check their work for originality before submitting it. The app uses Selenium and Beautiful Soup to automate the process of uploading files and retrieving plagiarism reports from the Turnitin website. The application is an enhancement of an existing service provided by Turnitin, a popular plagiarism detection service used by many educational institutions. The application uses a Python script to automate the process of submitting written content to the Turnitin website, retrieving the plagiarism report, and saving the report to a local file. The application can handle multiple files and provides an average plagiarism score for the submitted content. The application is applicable to anyone who needs to submit written work, including students, academics, and professionals. It is particularly useful for educational institutions that need to check large volumes of written work for plagiarism. The application is compatible with various file formats, including DOCX, PDF, and TXT. The application is released under an open-source license, meaning it is freely available to anyone who wishes to use it

Plagiarism Checker

The Turnitin Plagiarism Checker App is a program that helps users to check their written content for plagiarism. This project is important because plagiarism is a major issue in academia and other fields, where it can lead to academic misconduct, professional repercussions, and legal issues. This application is designed to solve the problem of plagiarism by making it easier for users to check their work for originality before submitting it. The app uses Selenium and Beautiful Soup to automate the process of uploading files and retrieving plagiarism reports from the Turnitin website. The application is an enhancement of an existing service provided by Turnitin, a popular plagiarism detection service used by many educational institutions. The application uses a Python script to automate the process of submitting written content to the Turnitin website, retrieving the plagiarism report, and saving the report to a local file. The application can handle multiple files and provides an average plagiarism score for the submitted content. The application is applicable to anyone who needs to submit written work, including students, academics, and professionals. It is particularly useful for educational institutions that need to check large volumes of written work for plagiarism. The application is compatible with various file formats, including DOCX, PDF, and TXT. The application is released under an open-source license, meaning it is freely available to anyone who wishes to use it

Plagiarism Checker

The Turnitin Plagiarism Checker App is a program that helps users to check their written content for plagiarism. This project is important because plagiarism is a major issue in academia and other fields, where it can lead to academic misconduct, professional repercussions, and legal issues. This application is designed to solve the problem of plagiarism by making it easier for users to check their work for originality before submitting it. The app uses Selenium and Beautiful Soup to automate the process of uploading files and retrieving plagiarism reports from the Turnitin website. The application is an enhancement of an existing service provided by Turnitin, a popular plagiarism detection service used by many educational institutions. The application uses a Python script to automate the process of submitting written content to the Turnitin website, retrieving the plagiarism report, and saving the report to a local file. The application can handle multiple files and provides an average plagiarism score for the submitted content. The application is applicable to anyone who needs to submit written work, including students, academics, and professionals. It is particularly useful for educational institutions that need to check large volumes of written work for plagiarism. The application is compatible with various file formats, including DOCX, PDF, and TXT. The application is released under an open-source license, meaning it is freely available to anyone who wishes to use it