A little bit of everything

Mobile-RFID is the term used to define those RFID services making use of the telecommunication network as the communication channel for getting information from a RFID-enabled object (tag); as such, mobile devices or PDAs are used as RFID readers. Mobile RFID enables a whole new set of services, based on the principle that a mobile device will offer both mobility and a broader reader range. These two principles add, at the same time, security issues to the already well known standard security and privacy concerns derived from RFID technology: information leakage, location, etc. Mobile Agent for RFID protection (MARP) defines a communication schema to enable security communication between the RFID-tags, readers and back-end servers, by providing an extra component working as a proxy between the reader and the RFID-tag. In this paper , a detailed description of MARP is presented, the range of services on which it can be used, together with some security issues with its countermeasures a...

The Session Initiation Protocol ( SIP ) is a signalling protocol used for establishing and closing multimedia sessions such us voice and video call over the internet. Using SIP is also possible to create video conferencing , streaming multimedia distribution (for online gaming for instance), send instant messages , handle presence information (online/offlie with rich status information). The protocol can be used for creating, modifying and terminating two-party ( unicast ) or multiparty ( multicast ) sessions consisting of one or several media streams. SIP clients typically use TCP or UDP to connect to SIP servers and other SIP endpoints. SIP is primarily used in setting up and tearing down voice or video calls. However, it can be used in any application where session initiation is a requirement. These include Event Subscription and Notification, Terminal mobility and so on. There are a large number of SIP-related RFCs that define behavior for such applications. All voice/video c...

The IP Multimedia Subsystem ( IMS ) represents the evolution of the traditional telecom architectures which will provide to service providers the possibility to create attractive multimedia services based on IP. IMS, as almost every technology in the telecom industry, is being standardized, mainly by 3GPP , OMA and IETF , which will ensure interoperability between different operators. A big disadvantage of this standardization activities is its slow process and the amount of specifications being defined. For service providers, it is a complex task to start developing or creating an architecture for their applications, and it get even worse for new players in the market willing to make some profit from IMS capabilities. The telecom industry is now aware of that, at least from the mobile platform perspective; with the already approved jsr-281 API and the upcoming jsr-325 , the developers can effortless access a set of essential IMS Services and Communication Enablers. In the same way, t...

Partitioning Attacks is one form of side channel attacks which deals with cryptographic algorithm implementation, and more specifically, with those implementations where sensitive data reveals some statistical dependency of the logical states and hence, several well known techniques such us power or electromagnetic analysis can be used to find out the value of such relevant data. Partitioning is related to the property of certain implementations where relevant data can be distinguished as belonging to certain clusters - partitions - of signals or side channel information, which the attacker may use to createa statistical dependency of the flow. Such leakiness can be caused by algorithms using, for instance, lookup tables to store values needed during computation. In this paper , an overview of partitioning attacks is presented by exploring a particular example, the characteristics under which it operates and certain countermeasures which has been also suggested to thwart such attack.

Homeopathy is an alternative medical approachbased on the principle that a disease with a given set of symptoms can be cured by a medicine (remedy) which is known to produce a similar set of symptoms. Homeopathic remedies are based on "proving" techniques, which is a process used to test certain substances on healthy volunteers and to observe their reactions (symptoms). In order to analyze specific symptoms, this process may take months or years and results or provings are registered in a repertory, which represents a collection of homeopathic provings, well known as the Homeophatic Materia Medica. The repertory is an extensive collection of many years of investigation. Software technologies allow us to index all this information, in order to be able to look for any related symptom or remedie based on different criteria, proximity or combination of words. Due to the complexity and broadness of homeopathy, there is not a defined vocabulary or schema on those repertories where...

One of main advantages of using the SIP protocol for developing IMS applications is its asynchronous nature. Interactive applications are those ones providing asynchronous notifications of events, and nowadays the current trend is on this direction (just take a look around to the asynchronous Web where you have the ability for the application to deliver state changes to the client, without the user necessarily having to initiate those updates). SIP is inherently an asynchronous protocol, where your User Agent or IMS entity is both client and server, and therefore, interactivity is a default feature. One of the main extensions offered by the SIP protocols is the SUBSCRIBE / NOTIFY mechanism RFC 3265. SUBSCRIBE/NOTIFY is a kind of observer pattern, where clients subscribe (listen) to a server for specific events, and once the server decides that a certain event must be communicated to the client, it notifies them about it (using the contact information provided by the client during su...

The Car Navigation System (CNS), as its name suggests, is a system or device to be used in cars and whose purpose is to provide real time (real time to be understood as opposite to store and forward) navigation information to its users. The CNS implements supporting functions used to provide navigation information: GPS for positioning information and RDS for traffic information. In addition, the system makes use of digital maps encapsulated in an external SD Card to display its current position. This document gives an overall view of the functionality offered by a CNS system as well as how internal software architecture may look like.

On Randomized Online Scheduling deals with the most common problem found in the study of online algorithms: minimize the makespan of a sequence of tasks or jobs when scheduled in different parallel machines. The Rand algorithm proposed by Alberts performs better - 1.916 competitive ratio - than known deterministic solutions for general m (being m the number of machines available). The approach is a combination of two different scheduling alternatives which are chosen randomly with 1/2 probability to serve the entire sequence of tasks. In this paper I present a review of the Rand algorithm itself, analyzing the lower bound theory presented, technical approach, the algorithm, some proof and concepts and particular examples of the findings.