I describe the digital forensics course (one semester) that we teach to year 2 undergraduate students at Deakin University. Along with some details about the students and their response to the course, I outline the two practical assignments they do, and for the second of these use forensic tools to show how data can be hidden in and retrieved from files.

In many commercial applications of broadcast, it is desirable that only those users who have paid for the service can retrieve broadcast data. Typical examples of such applications are pay-TV and copyright-protected digital materials. To ensure that only those users who have paid for the service can access materials, encryption of the broadcast is implemented. While only privileged users have secret keys to decrypt broadcast programs, malicious users may leak the secret keys to non-privileged users. In order to overcome this problem, secret keys are often kept in tamper-proof smart cards. When a user registers for the system, the service provider issues a smart card which is used for decryption of broadcast programs. In any subscriber scenario, the set of privileged users is dynamically changing and users may unsubscribe from the service at any time. A challenging problem is how to stop them to continue to obtain the broadcast data. This is called the revocation problem.

Although smart cards are intended to be tamper-proof, it may be possible to compromise them. With secret keys extracted from a compromised smart card, a pirate may create many clones of the smart card and sell them. Thus, an additional challenge is how to trace the source of a captured illegally cloned smart card and revoke all cloned cards. This is called the traitor tracing problem. In this work, our goal is to develop an efficient broadcast key distribution scheme, with revocation, which allows only privileged users to get access to the broadcast key. We aim to achieve this efficiently by using smart cards with limited computing power, communication capability, and storage. We assume the existence of a group controller (GC), which plays the role of a trusted third party. The GC broadcasts the encrypted data and key information through separate channels. The broadcast channels are insecure. Each privileged user is equipped with a Set Top Terminal (STT) with no return channel. In general, the STT is composed of a communication device, a tamper-proof decoder and a smart card slot in which a tamper-proof smart card (SC) is placed for key management. We implement polynomials over finite fields to establish efficient broadcast key distribution and efficient revocation.

(Joint paper of Prof. Lynn Batten (Deakin University) and co-author Dr. Xun Yi (Victoria University, Melbourne))

Wir stellen eine Architektur vor, die als Experimentierfeld zum Programmieren von Systemen mit mehreren Prozessoren gedacht ist. Deren Implementation besteht aus 12 identischen Prozessoren mit lokalen Speichern, die durch ein Netzwerk verbunden sind. Dazu wird ein einziger, programmierbarer Baustein (FPGA) verwendet.

Driven by the emergence of mobile and pervasive computing there is a growing demand for context-aware software systems that can dynamically adapt to their run-time environment. This talk will present some results of projects MADAM and QuA which has delivered comprehensive solutions for the development and operation of context-aware, self-adaptive applications. The main contributions of these projects are sophisticated middlewares that support the dynamic adaptation of component-based applications, and an innovative model-driven development methodology which is based on abstract adaptation models and corresponding model-to-code transformations. The talk will focus on the support for application adaptivity at the middleware level, and our experiences with a few real-world case studies that were built using the MADAM and QuA approaches.

Fr

ank Eliassen is a professor and leader of the research group on networks and distributed systems at the University of Oslo. He is also a senior researcher and project manager at Simula Research Laboratory. He received his degrees from the University of Tromsø in 1979. He has been doing research in the area of distributed systems since the early 80’s and on multimedia streaming since 1994. In later years he has mainly been working on adaptation middleware, focusing on support for self-adaptation of QoS-aware applications and services, applied to the application areas multimedia streaming, mobile computing and Grid computing. He has been a member of the program committees of many renowned conferences, he has been the project manager of many RCN projects and participated in many European projects. He has published more than 100 academic papers.