Mobile device users employ mobile applications to realize tasks once limited to desktop devices, e.g., web browsing, media (audio, video), managing health and fitness data, etc. While almost all of these applications require a degree of authentication and authorization, some involve highly sensitive data (PII and PHI) that must be strictly controlled as it is exchanged back and forth between the mobile application and its server side repository/database. Role-based access control (RBAC) is a candidate to protect highly sensitive data of such applications. There has been recent research related to authorization in mobile computing that has focused on extending RBAC to provide a finer-grained access control. However, most of these approaches attempt to apply RBAC at the application-level of the mobile device and/or require modifications to the mobile OS. In contrast, the research presented in this paper focuses on applying RBAC to the business layer of a mobile application, specifically to the API(s) that a mobile application utilizes to manage data. To support this, we propose an API-Based approach to RBAC for permission definition and enforcement that intercepts API service calls to alter information delivered/stored to the app. The proposed intercepting API-based approach is demonstrated via an existing mHealth application.

Ontologies are built to establish standard terminologies representing a semantic agreement between humans and knowledge systems via representational frameworks (e.g., KIF, DAML+OIL, OWL, etc.) that have been proposed in the research community, with limited adoption in industry. One possible reason is a lack of a formal model and associated process to more precisely and accurately design and develop ontologies. The authors’ prior work explored UML, entity-relationship diagrams, and XML as compared to RDF and OWL, identifying modeling capabilities lacking in ontologies. In all three approaches, design precedes instantiation which contrasts with ontology developers who build ontologies at the application level targeted to a specific domain. The paper proposes design-level modeling enhancements to ontologies by extending the OMG Ontology Definition Model (ODM) and OWL grammar with capabilities from the three aforementioned approaches, promoting a software engineering-based process. As a result, this work provides a more software engineering-oriented process to ontology design and development.

In software construction, analysis investigates system requirements and design captures system functionality. To facilitate analysis and design, one popular technique is the unified modeling language, UML . In UML, there are use-case diagrams for the interaction of users with system components, class diagrams for the static classes and relations among them, and sequence diagrams for the dynamic behavior of objects. However, analyzing and designing security requirements in UML is not directly supported. In this chapter, we incorporate role-based access control (RBAC) and mandatory access control (MAC) into UML use-case and class diagrams. In addition, we provide analysis across the UML diagrams, as actors, use cases and classes are defined, to support a degree of security assurance (with mutual exclusion), thereby realizing secure software design in UML. We briefly report on our RBAC/MAC enhancements into Borland’s UML tool Together Control Center. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Today, information sharing is critical to almost every institution. There is no more critical need for information sharing than during an international crisis, when international coalitions dynamically form. In the event of a crisis, whether it is humanitarian relief, natural disaster, combat operations, or terrorist incidents, international coalitions have an immediate need for information. These coalitions are formed with international cooperation, where each participating country offers whatever resources it can muster to support the given crisis. These situations can occur suddenly, simultaneously, and without warning. Often times, participants are coalition partners in one crisis and adversaries in another, raising difficult security issues with respect to information sharing. Our specific interest is in the Dynamic Coalition Problem (DCP), with an emphasis on the information sharing and security risks when coalitions are formed in response to a crisis. This paper defines the DCP and explores its intricate, challenging, and complex information and resource sharing, and security issues, utilizing real-world situations, which are drawn from a military domain.

In this paper, we present a technique to analyze and measure the reusability of object-oriented (OO) designs. The metrics can be incorporated into a design/development environment, so that reusability measurements, analysis, and improvements can be part of "business as usual" for an organization. Design reusability measurements also enable early identification of poor reuse potential, when it is still possible to modify/refine the design. The essential components of our approach are two reuse-specific characterizations of classes and hierarchies, and a set of metrics which objectively measures the dependencies among design components based on those reuse-specific characterizations.

The utilization of the object-oriented approach to design and develop systems/applications has continued to increase throughout the 1990s. Security concerned users and organizations must now protect and control access to object-oriented systems and a

Discusses a paradigm and prototype system for the design-time expression, checking and automatic implementation of the semantics of database updates. Enforcement rules are viewed as the implementation of constraints and are specified, checked for consistency, and then finally mapped to object-oriented code during database design. A classification of enforcement rule types is provided as a basis for these design activities, and the general strategy for specification, analysis and implementation of these rules within a semantic modeling paradigm is discussed. SORAC (Semantics, Objects, Relationships And Constraints), a prototype database design system of the University of Rhode Island, is also described.

An approach to the design of a database system, the multilingual database system (MLDS), has been proposed and implemented. MLDS is a single database system that can execute may transactions written respectively in different data languages and support many databases structured correspondingly in various data models, i.e. DL/I transactions on hierarchical databases, CODASYL-DML transactions on network databases, SQL transactions on relational databases, and Daplex transactions on functional databases. The authors describe MLDS, focusing on its motivation and structure. It is shown how MLDS, by providing an integrated environment for experimenting with data models and data languages, also serves as a testbed that provides insight to data models and data-model semantics, using qualitative and quantitative techniques. Related work on data-language comparison and analysis is indicated.>

This paper introduces a new and unconventional approach to the design and implementation of a database system, the multi-lingual database system (MLDS). The multi-lingual database system is a single database system that can execute many transactions written respectively in different data languages and support many databases structured correspondingly in various data models, i.e., DL/I transactions on hierarchical databases, CODASYL-DML transactions on network databases, SQL transactions on relational databases and Duplex transactions on functional databases. Thus, a multi-lingual database system allows the old transactions and existing databases to be migrated to the new environment, the experienced user to continue to utilize certain favorite features of existing data languages and data models, the new user to explore the strong features of the various data languages and data models, the hardware upgrade to be focused on a single system instead of a heterogeneous collection of database systems, and the database application to cover wider types of transactions and different modes of interactions.

Traditional database systems have long been plagued by performance problems when there is either an increase in the mainframe usage or in the database applications. Solutions to these problems have been sought, first, by offloading the database system from the mainframe computer to a single, dedicated backend computer. The backend computer has its own disk storage, is used to perform all of the database operations, and interacts with the mainframe. However. database systems with this software single-backend approach still encounter the performance problems when either the backend usage or database applications increase. The software multiple-backend approach to database management and hardware upgrade is therefore proposed to overcome the performance-gains and capacity-growth problems of either traditional mainframe-based database systems or conventional software single-backend database systems. In this paper we specify the design requirements and issues of the software multi-backend database systems. We show how these requirements and issues affect the design and implementation of a multi-backend database system known as MBDS. Since MBDS is designed specifically for performance gains, capacity growth, and hardware upgrade, we benchmark MBDS in order to verify whether its design and implementation can indeed relate the gains and growth directly to the multiplicity of backends in terms of the response-time reduction and invariance.