616587
Querying the trajectories of on-line mobile objects
Position data is expected to play a central role in a wide range of mobile computing applications, including advertising, leisure, safety, security, tourist, and traffic applications. Applications such as these are characterized by large quantities of wirelessly Internet-worked, position-aware mobile objects that receive services where the objects' position is essential. The movement of an object is captured via sampling, resulting in a trajectory consisting of a sequence of connected line segments for each moving object. This paper presents a technique for querying these trajectories. The technique uses indices for the processing of spatiotemporal range queries on trajectories. If object movement is constrained by the presence of infrastructure, e.g., lakes, park areas, etc., the technique is capable of exploiting this to reduce the range query, the purpose being to obtain better query performance. Specifically, an algorithm is proposed that segments the original range query based on the infrastructure contained in its range. The applicability and limitations of the proposal are assessed via empirical performance studies with varying datasets and parameter settings.
45102117
Temporal specialization
The authors explore a variety of temporal relations with specialized relationships between transaction and valid time. An example is a retroactive temporal event relation, where the event must have occurred before it was stored, i.e., the valid time-stamp is restricted to be less than the transaction time-stamp. The authors discuss many useful restrictions, defining a large number of specialized types of temporal relations, and indicate some of their applications. A detailed taxonomy of specialized temporal relations is presented. This taxonomy may be used during database design to specify the particular time semantics of temporal relations.<<ETX>>
26280940
Database Publication Practices
There has been a growing interest in improving the publication processes for database research papers. This panel reports on recent changes in those processes and presents an initial cut at historical data for the VLDB Journal and ACM Transactions on Database Systems.
44396365
Specification-based data reduction in dimensional data warehouses
Presents a powerful and easy-to-use technique for aggregation-based data reduction that enables the gradual change of the data from being detailed to being increasingly aggregated. The technique enables huge storage gains while retaining the data that is essential to the users, and it preserves the ability to query original and reduced data in an integrated manner.
1348801
Using differential technlques to efficiently support transaction time
We present an architecture for query processing in the relational model extended with transaction time. The architecture integrates standard query optimization and computation techniques with new differential computation techniques. Differential computation computes a query incrementally or decrementally from the cahced and indexed results of previous computations. The use of differential computation techniques is essential in order to provide efficient processing of queries that access very large temporal relations. Alternative query plans are integrated into a state transition network, where the state space includes backlogs of base relations, cached results from previous computations, a cache index, and intermediate results; the transitions include standard relational algebra operators, operators for constructing differential files, operators for differential computation, and combined operators. A rule set is presented to prune away parts of state transition networks that are not promising, and dynamic programming techniques are used to identify the optimal plans from the remaining state transition networks. An extended logical access path serves as a “structuring” index on the cached results and contains, in addition, vital statistics for the query optimization process (including statistics about base relations, backlogs, and queries-previously computed and cached, previously computed, or just previously estimated).
1723263
Multidimensional data modeling for location-based services
Abstract.With the recent and continuing advances in areas such as wireless communications and positioning technologies, mobile, location-based services are becoming possible.Such services deliver location-dependent content to their users. More specifically, these services may capture the movements and requests of their users in multidimensional databases, i.e., data warehouses, and content delivery may be based on the results of complex queries on these data warehouses. Such queries aggregate detailed data in order to find useful patterns, e.g., in the interaction of a particular user with the services.The application of multidimensional technology in this context poses a range of new challenges. The specific challenge addressed here concerns the provision of an appropriate multidimensional data model. In particular, the paper extends an existing multidimensional data model and algebraic query language to accommodate spatial values that exhibit partial containment relationships instead of the total containment relationships normally assumed in multidimensional data models. Partial containment introduces imprecision in aggregation paths. The paper proposes a method for evaluating the imprecision of such paths. The paper also offers transformations of dimension hierarchies with partial containment relationships to simple hierarchies, to which existing precomputation techniques are applicable.
14146996
Cryptographic access control in a distributed file system
Traditional access control mechanisms rely on a reference monitor to mediate access to protected resources. Reference monitors are inherently centralized and existing attempts to distribute the functionality of the reference monitor suffer from problems of scalability.Cryptographic access control is a new distributed access control paradigm designed for a global federation of information systems. It defines an implicit access control mechanism, which relies exclusively on cryptography to provide confidentiality and integrity of data managed by the system. It is particularly designed to operate in untrusted environments where the lack of global knowledge and control are defining characteristics.The proposed mechanism has been implemented in a distributed file system, which is presented in this paper along with a preliminary evaluation of the proposed mechanism.
14551885
A unified security framework for networked applications
Various security models have been proposed for different types of applications and numerous types of execution environments. These models are typically reinforced by adding code to the application, which authenticates principals, authorises operations and establishes secure communication among distributed software components (e.g., clients and servers). This code is often application and context-specific, which makes it difficult to integrate an application with other each other.In this paper we propose a new unified access control mechanism that supports most of the existing security models and offers a number of additional controls that are not normally provided by security mechanisms. Moreover, the proposed mechanism integrates well with existing programming paradigms for distributed application, e.g., client/server technology and component based programming. This means that it can be seamlessly integrated with most existing distributed applications. We have implemented the proposed mechanism in a framework, that can be instantiated to implement different security models and policies. We present a qualitative evaluation that demonstrates the framework's ability to support a wide range of security policies and a preliminary performance evaluation of the framework.
26363914
Trust-Based Route Selection in Dynamic Source Routing
Unlike traditional mobile wireless networks, ad hoc networks do not rely on any fixed infrastructure. Nodes rely on each other to route packets to other mobile nodes or toward stationary nodes that may act as a gateway to a fixed network. Mobile nodes are generally assumed to participate as routers in the mobile wireless network. However, blindly trusting all other nodes to respect the routing protocol exposes the local node to a wide variety of vulnerabilities. Traditional security mechanisms rely on either the authenticated identity of the requesting principal or some form of credentials that authorise the client to perform certain actions. Generally, these mechanisms require some underlying infrastructure, e.g., a public key infrastructure (PKI). However, we cannot assume such infrastructures to be in place in an ad hoc network. In this paper we propose an extension to an existing ad hoc routing protocols, which selects the route based on a local evaluation of the trustworthiness of all known intermediary nodes (routers) on the route to the destination. We have implemented this mechanism in an existing ad hoc routing protocol, and we show how trust can be built from previous experience and how trust can be used to avoid routing packets through unreliable nodes.
2348538
Combating Spam with TEA
— It has been observed that the underlying reasons for the continuing growth of the " spam " problem are a lack of reliable sender authentication and the near-zero cost of sending huge volumes of marketing material worldwide, via email. Previous attempts to address these problems either change the fundamental properties of email, reducing its usefulness to legitimate senders, or require an infeasible move to new system architectures. In this paper we present two new techniques for increasing the level of sender authentication for legacy-system plain text email addresses. We then show how these Trustworthy Email Addresses (TEA) can be used in conjunction with a trust and risk-based security framework as an effective anti-spam tool. Our prototype Java implementation is then evaluated in the context of a spammer threat model with an economic analysis of the viability of each threat.
604106
Protection reconfiguration for reusable software
Secure distributed applications often include code to authenticate users, verify access rights, and establish secure communication channels between software components (e.g., clients and servers). This code is often specific to the application and to the context in which the application is used. Embedding protection definitions in the application code makes it difficult to reuse because different applications often have very different protection constraints. We argue that protection definitions should be specified separately from application code in order to facilitate protection reconfiguration and software reuse. This separation may be achieved by specifying protection definitions in a Protection Interface Definition Language, and is implemented by proxies installed between software components that are executing in different protection contexts (e.g., between client and server). Mechanisms for creation and dynamic installation of protection proxies have been implemented in a distributed shared memory system, and the viability of our solution is demonstrated by a simple name server, which is currently being reused in three different protection contexts.