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Digital forensic analysis of the private mode of browsers on Android

The smartphone has become an essential electronic device in our daily lives. We carry our most precious and important data on it, from family videos of the last few years to credit card information so that we can pay with our phones. In addition, in recent years, mobile devices have become the preferred device for surfing the web, already representing more than 50% of Internet traffic. As one of the devices we spend the most time with throughout the day, it is not surprising that we are increasingly demanding a higher level of privacy. One of the measures introduced to help us protect our data by isolating certain activities on the Internet is the private mode integrated in most modern browsers. Of course, this feature is not new, and has been available on desktop platforms for more than a decade. Reviewing the literature, one can find several studies that test the correct functioning of the private mode on the desktop. However, the number of studies conducted on mobile devices is incredibly small. And not only is it small, but also most of them perform the tests using various emulators or virtual machines running obsolete versions of Android. Therefore, in this paper we apply the methodology we presented in a previous work to Google Chrome, Brave, Mozilla Firefox, and Tor Browser running on a tablet with Android 13 and on two virtual devices created with Android Emulator. The results confirm that these browsers do not store information about the browsing performed in private mode in the file system. However, the analysis of the volatile memory made it possible to recover the username and password used to log in to a website or the keywords typed in a search engine, even after the devices had been rebooted.

An architecture for client virtualization: A case study

As edge clouds become more widespread, it is important to study their impact on traditional application architectures, most importantly the separation of the data and control planes of traditional clients. We explore such impact using the virtualization of a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) client as a case study. In this model, an end user accesses and controls the virtual P2P client application using a web browser and all P2P application-related control messages originate and terminate from the virtual P2P client deployed inside the remote server. The web browser running on the user device only manages download and upload of the P2P data packets. BitTorrent, as it is the most widely deployed P2P platform, is used to validate the feasibility and study the performance of our approach. We introduce a prototype that has been deployed in public cloud infrastructures. We present simulation results which show clear improvements in the use of user resources. Based on this experience we derive lessons on the challenges and benefits from such edge cloud-based deployments.

Modeling web applications infrastructure with ASMs

We describe via Abstract State Machines the major ingredients of contemporary web applications: a web browser running JavaScript programs and a web server dispatching requests to one of several modules, each one representing a class of established web application frameworks.The web browser model comes in four levels, namely transport, stream, context and browser level, and is focussed on the interaction with possibly multiple servers (which requires a concurrent computation model) and on script execution (which requires a dynamic assignment of agents to programs). The server model is focussed on the Request–Reply pattern, and specifies a delegation strategy where the handling of a request is entrusted to a module. We show how several major frameworks for web applications can be described as progressive refinements of a number of basic modules. Three modules are further detailed: static file transfer, CGI and generic scripting modules.

Presentations from the 10th International Conference on Zebrafish Development and Genetics, Madison, Wisconsin, June 20–24, 2012

Presentations from the 10th International Conference on Zebrafish Development and Genetics, Madison, Wisconsin, June 20–24, 2012

A voltmeter with browser-based control: an inexpensive instrument

This paper presents a home-made voltmeter which has browser-based controls. The voltmeter is basically an analog-to-digital converter implemented with a microprocessor and some supporting circuitry. The browser-based control system enables one to access the voltmeter through the Internet from anywhere in the world. The control of the instrument is solely through any standard web browser running on any platform; no additional client software is required.

Instant Machine Health Assessment Through the Use of Mobile Phones/PDAS

Most of the existing remote machine health monitoring systems, which use computers as their platform, must have wired broadband or WiFi connected to the Internet. If such connection is not available, then the remote monitoring cannot be performed. With the ever increasing popularity of mobile phones/PDAs, users hope to be able to perform remote monitoring via their mobile phones/PDAs so that they can analyze their machines at anytime and anywhere as long as mobile network is available. In this paper, two architectures using mobiles phones/PDAs to perform remote monitoring are presented. The first architecture uses an on-site server to perform the user’s required analysis. All the diagnostic algorithms are installed in the on-site server. A remote user is allowed to select the desired algorithm and control the sampling parameters through the use of JSP (JavaServer Pages). The user can obtain the analyzing results through a browser running in a remotely located computer or via a mobile phone/PDA installed with our J2ME (Java Platform, Micro Edition) based programs. The second architecture allows the user not only obtain the sensory data collected from on-site machines, but also perform fault diagnosis on his mobile phone/PDA. Here, the diagnostic algorithms are installed and executed in the mobile phone/PDA. A demonstration is presented in this paper regarding the development of the popular fast Fourier transform (FFT) on a mobile phone for vibration-based machine fault diagnosis. The FFT has been successfully tested using real machine data. The difficulty in the implementation of FFT on a mobile phone due to its limited computational resources and its solution are mentioned. The advantages and limitations of these two architectures, as well as the future research direction on wireless remote monitoring systems are discussed.

An electronic thesaurus of Evidence Based Laboratory Medicine hematological and biochemical diagnostic tests

The adoption of Evidence Based Laboratory Medicine (EBLM) has been hampered until today by the lack of effective tools. The SIMeL EBLM e-Thesaurus (on-line Repertoire of the diagnostic effectiveness of the laboratory, radiology and cardiology test) provides a useful support to clinical laboratory professionals and to clinicians for the interpretation of the diagnostic tests. The e-Thesaurus is an application developed using Microsoft Active Server Pages technology and carried out with Web Server Microsoft Internet Information Server and is available at the SIMeL website using a browser running JavaScript scripts (Internet Explorer is recommended). It contains a database (in Italian, English and Spanish) of the sensitivity and specificity (including the 95% confidence interval), the positive and negative likelihood ratios, the Diagnostic Odds Ratio and the Number Needed to Diagnose of more than 2000 diagnostic (most laboratory but also cardiology and radiology) tests. The e-Thesaurus improves the previous SIMeL paper and CD Thesaurus; its main features are a three languages search and a continuous and an easy updating capability.

Context-Aware Browser

We propose the Context-Aware Browser (CAB), a new approach to context-aware Web content perusal by means of mobile devices. The CAB is a Web browser running on mobile devices, exploiting artificial intelligence techniques and mixing several ingredients. The novelty of the proposed approach is threefold. First, our proposal allows a different perspective in the development of Web contents, which should be conceived in a context-dependent way. Our framework makes it possible to develop information and web applications specifically for a given environment, which will become capable to transmit context information, and ad hoc, context-based applications to whom will enter that context. Second, we exploit several informations provided by the surrounding environment and not only the location in order to carry out a more refined search of web contents and applications. Third, the CAB approach involves an innovative two stage retrieval and a filtering process, that minimizes privacy issues.

REMOTE AND MOBILE EXPERIMENTATION: PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES OF AN UBIQUITOUS LEARNING PLACE

Concepts like E-learning and M-learning are changing the traditional learning place. No longer restricted to well-defined physical places, education on Automation and other Engineering areas is entering the so-called ubiquitous learning place, where even the more practical knowledge (acquired at lab classes) is now moving into, due to emergent concepts such as Remote Experimentation or Mobile Experimentation. While Remote Experimentation is traditionally regarded as the remote access to real-world experiments through a simple web browser running on a PC connected to the Internet, Mobile Experimentation may be seen as the access to those same (or others) experiments, through mobile devices, used in M-learning contexts. These two distinct client types (PCs versus mobile devices) pose specific requirements for the remote lab infrastructure, namely the ability to tune the experiment interface according to the characteristics (e.g. display size) of the accessing device. This paper addresses those requirements, namely by proposing a new architecture for the remote lab infrastructure able to accommodate both Remote and Mobile Experimentation scenarios.

A web interface to databases associated with a plant growth simulator

A web interface was developed for scientists, teachers and students to access plant, weather and soil databases used for plant growth simulation studies. The interface is coded as a Java applet with a graphical user interface (GUI) whereas the databases are managed by Microsoft Access. The Java applet obtains input data from the databases, and then directly runs a plant growth simulator programmed in Java. With a Java (JDK1.1)-embedded web browser running under Windows 95/98/NT, UNIX, or other operating system, users can link to the run-time Java applet from our website. For plant growth simulation studies, users can choose a target plant species and different weather and soil conditions from menu choices built into the GUI, and then input agronomic data such as planting date, row spacing, etc. into the relevant text fields. The output is displayed in both graphical and text forms by clicking appropriately marked buttons for such state variables as phenological events, leaf area index (LAI), plant height, biomass, shoot/root ratio, photosynthesis, evapotranspiration, etc.

ReUse/Web: Web-based Ada reuse

In his article "Software Reuse Myths" from the January 1988 issue of ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, Will Tracz discusses why software reuse has not grown to its full potential. Engineers first proposed the concept of a subroutine library at the University of Cambridge in 1949. Yet the concept has not extended much past this level.At the time Tracz wrote this article, interest had begun to reemerge in the concept of software reuse. Still, Tracz believes that nine myths surround software reuse that have prevented it from becoming more widespread. Specifically, three myths relate to my thesis:1. Software reuse is a technical problem.2. Special tools are needed for software reuse.3. Ada has solved the reuse problem.As far as the first myth goes, the only technical problem is the lack of search methods to find the right pieces of code (which my project should help alleviate). Beyond that, the problem is more psychological, sociological or economic. For example, there is the "Not From Here" attitude pervading industry that Icads people to believe that software developed outside of their company is unreliable.Tracz believes you only need special tools (the second myth) when you become truly serious about reuse. Most software libraries, he claims, are only 100-200 components in size and that programmers can easily navigate this many components without any tools. Also, most instances of reuse occur when a programmer modifies existing programs that either he or a coworker wrote, so again he does not need a tool to find what he needs. I believe that the reuse mentality is a difficult one to accept and any tool that can make the transition to this attitude easier should be explored and utilized, no matter how small the number of components in the software library.Tracz refutes the third myth by stating that "writing a generic package in Ada does not necessarily make it reusable any more than writing a Fortran subroutine or assembly language macro." Simply put, generic packages are not enough to encourage reuse because the packages must still be instantiated with actual data types. The attitudes of the programmers using the language are more important than the language itself in determining whether or not code will be reused. I hope that my project makes Ada more accessible to code reuse and can change some programmers' attitudes about reuse.I believe that this attitude can change if programmers have access to a simple tool to browse software libraries that runs on a variety of hardware platforms to maximize usage and potential. This idea gave rise to ReUSE-WWW, an Ada specification file browser running under Netscape. Since Netscape runs on many platforms (PC, Macintosh, Unix-based., etc.), an application using Netscape as its "operating system" would be ideal. Fortunately, recent developments in World Wide Web programming, such as JavaScript and Perl CGI (Common Gateway Interface) have made this goal extremely attainable.ReUSE-WWW may not run under Microsoft's Internet Explorer, though. It also does not provide any editing, compiling, linking, or running capabilities. I assume that a potential user of the system already has an editor of choice and knows where to get an Ada 95 compiler, such as GNAT.