Standardized toolchain and model development for video quality assessment: the mission of the joint effort group in VQEG

International audienceSince 1997, the Video Quality Experts Group (VQEG) has been active in the field of subjective and objective video quality assessment. The group has validated competitive quality metrics throughout several projects. Each of these projects requires mandatory actions such as creating a testplan and obtaining databases consisting of degraded video sequences with corresponding subjective quality ratings. Recently, VQEG started a new open initiative, the Joint Effort Group (JEG), for encouraging joint collaboration on all mandatory actions needed to validate video quality metrics. Within the JEG, effort is made to advance the field of both subjective and objective video quality measurement by providing proper software tools and subjective databases to the community. One of the subprojects of the JEG is the joint development of a hybrid H.264/AVC objective quality metric. In this paper, we introduce the JEG and provide an overview of the different ongoing activities within this newly started group

Secure Identification in Social Wireless Networks

The applications based on social networking have brought revolution towards social life and are continuously gaining popularity among the Internet users. Due to the advanced computational resources offered by the innovative hardware and nominal subscriber charges of network operators, most of the online social networks are transforming into the mobile domain by offering exciting applications and games exclusively designed for users on the go. Moreover, the mobile devices are considered more personal as compared to their desktop rivals, so there is a tendency among the mobile users to store sensitive data like contacts, passwords, bank account details, updated calendar entries with key dates and personal notes on their devices. The Project Social Wireless Network Secure Identification (SWIN) is carried out at Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS) to explore the practicality of providing the secure mobile social networking portal with advanced security features to tackle potential security threats by extending the existing methods with more innovative security technologies. In addition to the extensive background study and the determination of marketable use-cases with their corresponding security requirements, this thesis proposes a secure identification design to satisfy the security dimensions for both online and offline peers. We have implemented an initial prototype using PHP Socket and OpenSSL library to simulate the secure identification procedure based on the proposed design. The design is in compliance with 3GPP‟s Generic Authentication Architecture (GAA) and our implementation has demonstrated the flexibility of the solution to be applied independently for the applications requiring secure identification. Finally, the thesis provides strong foundation for the advanced implementation on mobile platform in future

PALPAS - PAsswordLess PAssword Synchronization

Tools that synchronize passwords over several user devices typically store the encrypted passwords in a central online database. For encryption, a low-entropy, password-based key is used. Such a database may be subject to unauthorized access which can lead to the disclosure of all passwords by an offline brute-force attack. In this paper, we present PALPAS, a secure and user-friendly tool that synchronizes passwords between user devices without storing information about them centrally. The idea of PALPAS is to generate a password from a high entropy secret shared by all devices and a random salt value for each service. Only the salt values are stored on a server but not the secret. The salt enables the user devices to generate the same password but is statistically independent of the password. In order for PALPAS to generate passwords according to different password policies, we also present a mechanism that automatically retrieves and processes the password requirements of services. PALPAS users need to only memorize a single password and the setup of PALPAS on a further device demands only a one-time transfer of few static data.Comment: An extended abstract of this work appears in the proceedings of ARES 201

An Automated Data Warehouse

An increasing number of organizations are implementing data warehouses to strengthen their decision support systems. This comes with the challenges of the population and the periodic update of data warehouses. In this thesis, we present a tool that provides users with features to create a warehouse database and transform structures of the source database into structures for the warehouse database. It is highly interactive, easy to use, and hides the underlying complexity of manual SQL code generation from its users. Attributes from source tables can be mapped into new attributes in the warehouse database tables using aggregate functions. Then, relevant data is automatically transported from the source database to the newly created warehouse. The tool thus integrates warehouse creation, schema mapping and data population into a single generalpurpose tool. This tool has been designed as a component of the framework for an automated data warehouse being developed at theComputer Science Department, University of New Orleans. Users of this framework are the database administrators, who will also be able to synchronize updates of multiple copies of the data warehouse. Warehouse images that need to be updated are taken offline and applications that need to access the data warehouse can now access any of the other image warehouses. The Switching Application built into this framework switches between databases in a way that is totally transparent to applications so that they do not realize existence of multiple copies of the data warehouse. In effect, even non-technical users can create, populate and update data warehouses with minimal time and effort