The far side of mobile application integrated development environments

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016. Smart phones are, nowadays, a necessity for the vast majority of individuals around the globe. In addition to the ubiquitous computing paradigm supported by such devices, there are numerous software applications that utilize the high computational capabilities that they offer. This type of software is a vital part of what is known as e-Commerce, with a variety of business models proposed and implemented. Lately, a new era of free-ware mobile application has arisen with paid features and promoted content in them. Piracy is not only the weakest point of software’s financial ecosystem for conventional computing systems but also for smartphones. Actions like replication, redistribution and licensing violations can cause financial losses of colossal extent to their creators. Mobile applications also introduce the following peculiarity: They are distributed through predefined channels (Application Stores) owned by mobile operating system vendors such as Apple, Google and Microsoft. In this research we present several scenarios where cracked and modified applications can be freely used into every non jailbroken iOS device. Moreover it is demonstrated that not even in strict mobile environments, such as Apple’s, end-users should be considered as trusted entities from application developers by default

Best Effort and Practice Activation Codes

Activation Codes are used in many different digital services and known by many different names including voucher, e-coupon and discount code. In this paper we focus on a specific class of ACs that are short, human-readable, fixed-length and represent value. Even though this class of codes is extensively used there are no general guidelines for the design of Activation Code schemes. We discuss different methods that are used in practice and propose BEPAC, a new Activation Code scheme that provides both authenticity and confidentiality. The small message space of activation codes introduces some problems that are illustrated by an adaptive chosen-plaintext attack (CPA-2) on a general 3-round Feis- tel network of size 2^(2n) . This attack recovers the complete permutation from at most 2^(n+2) plaintext-ciphertext pairs. For this reason, BEPAC is designed in such a way that authenticity and confidentiality are in- dependent properties, i.e. loss of confidentiality does not imply loss of authenticity.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures, TrustBus 201

The Greater The Power, The More Dangerous The Abuse: Facing Malicious Insiders in The Cloud

The financial crisis made companies around the world search for cheaper and more efficient solutions to cover their needs in terms of computational power and storage. Their quest came to end with the birth of Cloud Computing infrastructures. However, along with the new promising technology, new attack vectors were born, and one old and known threat, that of Malicious Insiders reappeared. Insiders can use their privileged position inside the Cloud infrastructure to accomplish or help in attacks against a Cloud infrastructure. In this paper, we propose a practical and efficient intrusion detection system solution for Cloud infrastructures based on Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) acceleration. Our solution monitors the deployed virtual machines operations and especially those of the host Operating System’s, known as Dom0, correlating the collected information to detect uncommon behavior based on the SmithWaterman algorithm. Our proposal makes possible the cooperation of a variety of known hypervisors along with every known GPU acceleration unit used, thus offering the maximum of security mechanics while at the same time minimizing the imposed overhead in terms of Central Processing Unit (CPU) usage

The far side of mobile application integrated development environments

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016. Smart phones are, nowadays, a necessity for the vast majority of individuals around the globe. In addition to the ubiquitous computing paradigm supported by such devices, there are numerous software applications that utilize the high computational capabilities that they offer. This type of software is a vital part of what is known as e-Commerce, with a variety of business models proposed and implemented. Lately, a new era of free-ware mobile application has arisen with paid features and promoted content in them. Piracy is not only the weakest point of software’s financial ecosystem for conventional computing systems but also for smartphones. Actions like replication, redistribution and licensing violations can cause financial losses of colossal extent to their creators. Mobile applications also introduce the following peculiarity: They are distributed through predefined channels (Application Stores) owned by mobile operating system vendors such as Apple, Google and Microsoft. In this research we present several scenarios where cracked and modified applications can be freely used into every non jailbroken iOS device. Moreover it is demonstrated that not even in strict mobile environments, such as Apple’s, end-users should be considered as trusted entities from application developers by default

Capital structure and financial flexibility: Expectations of future shocks

We test one of the main predictions of the financial flexibility paradigm, that expectations about future firm-specific investment shocks affect the firm's leverage. We extract the expectations of small and large future shocks from the market prices of equity options. We find that leverage decreases when expectations for any one of the two types of future shocks increase and the relation is statistically significant even when we control for standard determinants of leverage and the firm's probability of default. Expectations for future shocks explain a greater fraction of leverage variation than most standard determinants of leverage do and they affect more the small and financially constrained firms. Our results are not subject to an endogeneity bias and they confirm DeAngelo et al. (2011) model's predictions and the evidence that managers seek for financial flexibility

Technical guidelines for enhancing privacy and data protection in modern electronic medical environments

Raising awareness and providing guidance to on-line data protection is undoubtedly a crucial issue worldwide. Equally important is the issue of applying privacy-related legislation in a coherent and coordinated way. Both these topics gain extra attention when referring to medical environments and, thus, to the protection of patients' privacy and medical data. Electronic medical transactions require the transmission of personal and medical information over insecure communication channels like the Internet. It is, therefore, a rather straightforward task to capture the electronic medical behavior of a patient, thus constructing "patient profiles," or reveal sensitive information related to a patient's medical history. The consequence is clearly a potential violation of the patient's privacy. We performed a risk analysis study for a Greek shared care environment for the treatment of patients suffering from beta-thalassemia, an empirically embedded scenario that is representative of many other electronic medical environments; we capitalized on its results to provide an assessment of the associated risks, focusing on the description of countermeasures, in the form of technical guidelines that can be employed in such medical environments for protecting the privacy of personal and medical information. © 2005 IEEE

Supply of capital and capital structure: The role of financial development

We explore the effect of financial development on corporate capital structure and the tightness of financial constraints that firms face. We employ an econometric technique that allows us to explicitly test for convergence in capital structure. This technique increases the power of our statistical tests. In doing so, we identify a group of convergent firms. The driving force of convergence is financial development, which positively affects the firms' leverage ratio. We also identify a group of firms, whose leverage is not affected by financial development, because they are financially constrained

Asclepion of Epidaurus: the application of a historical perspective in medical education

Background: The Asclepion of Epidaurus is one of the first healing environments in the world. Descendants of Asclepius, specifically medical students, have been singularly deprived of any information concerning this legacy. This article illuminates the role of Asclepion of Epidaurus and examines the view of medical students upon the subject and the possible benefits of this knowledge in their medical education. Methods: The participants were 105 senior-year students from the Athens Medical School, who attended a multi-media assisted lecture related to the structure and the role of the Asclepion of Epidaurus. Afterwards, they answered anonymously a questionnaire of 12 pairs of opposite adjectives in order to describe their view regarding the meaning of Asclepion. The method used in the evaluation of their answers was that of semantic differential. Results: The attitude of the students towards the meaning of Asclepion was positive, showing interest and excitement about a powerful, though unfamiliar piece of knowledge. Conclusion: Today’s novice doctors have welcomed the concept of Asclepion as essential knowledge for the service they will be called to fulfill. The potential benefits of the Asclepian ideals in medical education and ethos are thoroughly discussed. © 2022, The Author(s)

A Java-based Electronic Healthcare Record Software for Beta-thalassaemia

Background: Beta-thalassaemia is a hereditary disease, the prevalence of which is high in persons of Mediterranean, African, and Southeast Asian ancestry. In Greece it constitutes an important public health problem. Beta-thalassaemia necessitates continuous and complicated health care procedures such as daily chelation; biweekly transfusions; and periodic cardiology, endocrinology, and hepatology evaluations. Typically, different care items are offered in different, often-distant, health care units, which leads to increased patient mobility. This is especially true in rural areas. Medical records of patients suffering from beta-thalassaemia are inevitably complex and grow in size very fast. They are currently paper-based, scattered over all units involved in the care process. This hinders communication of information between health care professionals and makes processing of the medical records difficult, thus impeding medical research. Objective: Our objective is to provide an electronic means for recording, communicating, and processing all data produced in the context of the care process of patients suffering from beta-thalassaemia. Methods: We have developed - and we present in this paper - Java-based Electronic Healthcare Record (EHCR) software, called JAnaemia. JAnaemia is a general-purpose EHCR application, which can be customized for use in all medical specialties. Customization for beta-thalassaemia has been performed in collaboration with 4 Greek hospitals. To be capable of coping with patient record diversity, JAnaemia has been based on the EHCR architecture proposed in the ENV 13606: 1999 standard, published by the CEN/TC251 committee. Compliance with the CEN architecture also ensures that several additional requirements are fulfilled in relation to clinical comprehensiveness; to record sharing and communication; and to ethical, medico-legal, and computational issues. Special care has been taken to provide a user-friendly, form-based interface for data entry and processing. Results: The experience gained through the use of JAnaemia in 4 Greek hospitals reveals a significant contribution towards (1) improvement of the quality of the data being recorded, since data entry is guided by appropriate forms, (2) easier cooperation between physicians, who share a common information repository, and (3) increased processing capabilities, which facilitate medical research. Conclusions: JAnaemia appears to be a useful tool, which can improve the quality of care offered to beta-thalassaemic patients in Greece