Higher education is facing a paradigm shift in the ownership and use of computer hardware. The school computer lab is no longer the primary place of student computer use. Instead, students increasingly expect to use their own hardware to complete their school assignments. This creates a challenge for computer science educators: we must now support a wide range of heterogeneous hardware without the benefits of tight control over its use. To address this ``Bring-Your-Own-Device'' (BYOD) challenge, we leverage virtualization and software packaging systems to gracefully deploy and support a standardized development environment for all core CS courses across a range of both school-owned and student-owned computing devices. We have deployed and evaluated our system for the previous two years at scale and continue to actively use and develop it. It has effectively helped us support multiple classes comprising hundreds of students with very limited IT staffing. We describe the design and management of our system, present our experience using our system, and discuss the lessons we've learned. We also provide data reflecting current student user experience with our system. Our system has proven very effective in addressing the student BYOD challenge in a manageable, cost-efficient, and easy-to-use manner.

An important aspect of Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp) is augmenting people and environments with computational resources which provide information and services unobtrusively whenever and wherever required. In line with the vision of UbiComp, we have developed a multi-user location-awareness system by following a user-centred design and evaluation method. In this paper we discuss the development of such a system that allows users to share informative feedback about their current geographical location. The proposed system can be used by various users, for example family members, relatives or a group of friends, in order to share the information related to their locations and to interact with each other. It is intended that this type of system in the future will become a typical part of the Smart Home environment.

This paper describes the design, implementation and performance of a security and privacy framework for SenSearch, which is a sensor-based search and rescue system for people in emergency situation in wilderness areas. A key obstacle in a wide deployment of search and rescue systems such as SenSearch is vulnerability to users' security and privacy. Support for security and privacy for SenSearch has been carefully built by employing a combination of both symmetric and asymmetric key cryptography to meet the constraints of resource-limited devices and short time intervals during which most security operations have to be performed.

The Internet Chess Club (ICC) is a popular online chess server with more than 30,000 members worldwide including various celebrities and the best chess players in the world. Although the ICC Web site assures its users that the security protocol used between client and server provides sufficient security for sensitive information to be transmitted (such as credit card numbers), we show this is not true. In particular we show how a passive adversary can easily read all communications with a trivial amount of computation, and how an active adversary can gain virtually unlimited powers over an ICC user. We also show simple methods for defeating the timestamping mechanism used by ICC. For each problem we uncover, we suggest repairs and draw conclusions on how to best avoid repeating these types of problems in the future

We describe a parallelizable block-cipher mode of operation that simultaneously provides privacy and authenticity. OCB encrypts-and-authenticates a nonempty string M ∈ {0, 1}* using ⌈| M |/ n ⌉ + 2 block-cipher invocations, where n is the block length of the underlying block cipher. Additional overhead is small. OCB refines a scheme, IAPM, suggested by Charanjit Jutla. Desirable properties of OCB include the ability to encrypt a bit string of arbitrary length into a ciphertext of minimal length, cheap offset calculations, cheap key setup, a single underlying cryptographic key, no extended-precision addition, a nearly optimal number of block-cipher calls, and no requirement for a random IV. We prove OCB secure, quantifying the adversary's ability to violate the mode's privacy or authenticity in terms of the quality of its block cipher as a pseudorandom permutation (PRP) or as a strong PRP, respectively.

We describe a parallelizable block-cipher mode of operation that simultaneously provides privacy and authenticity. OCB encrypts-and-authenticates a nonempty string M ε {0,1}• using \lceil |M|/n\rceil + 2 block-cipher invocations, where n is the block length of the underlying block cipher. Additional overhead is small. OCB refines a scheme, IAPM, suggested by Charanjit Jutla. Desirable properties of OCB include: the ability to encrypt a bit string of arbitrary length into a ciphertext of minimal length; cheap offset calculations; cheap session setup; a single underlying cryptographic key; no extended-precision addition; a nearly optimal number of block-cipher calls; and no requirement for a random IV. We prove OCB secure, quantifying the adversary's ability to violate the mode's privacy or authenticity in terms of the quality of its block cipher as a pseudorandom permutation (PRP) or as a strong PRP, respectively.