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DIPARTIMENTO DI INFORMATICA |
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Research Report Year 2003
Computer Science
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Last and first name |
Position |
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Bergadano Francesco |
Full Professor |
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Sirovich Franco |
Full Professor |
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Gunetti Daniele |
Associate Professor |
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Ruffo Giancarlo |
Researcher |
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Cavagnino Davide |
Researcher |
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Nesta Andrea |
PhD. Student |
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Dal Checco Paolo |
PhD. Student |
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| Musarra Alessandro | Temporary Researcher | musarra(at)di.unito.it |
A list of the activities for year 2003 follows.
a) Multicast Authentication
In a multicast transmission context, it may be important to securely
determine the origin of data, i.e. authenticate the sender. We worked
on some solutions that may be applied to this problem. In particular,
we studied the properties of a protocol we previously developed, and
we have under development some improvements to that protocol. These
improvements are oriented to allow the operation of the protocol in
an environment in which there may be data losses, trying to maintain
the efficiency characteristic in the generation and exchange of the
authentication information.
b) Internet Traffic Certification and Analysis
There are contexts in which accesses to a web site should be controlled
and verified, producing statistical data that are reliable and useful
for the end user. By reliable we mean that the logged information
on the web accesses correctly describes the interaction between the
client and the server in terms of IP address and requested resource.
We are developing solutions that satisfy the previous requirements,
and that, at the same time produce usable information for users needing
usage data of a web site.
c) User Identification within biometric analysis
We try to ascertain user identity through the way individuals type
on a computer keyboard. Using an original method able to compute the
''distance'' between two typing samples, we were able to reach an
accuracy of less than 4% of false alarms and of less than 0.01% of
unspotted impostors, for typing samples of fixed text long about 700
characters. We are now working of the extension of our application
to completely free text, that is, text chosen and entered by the users
because of their normal job. This will allow us to monitor individuals
that have already passed the authentication phase and are using a
computer. Individual showing typing habits different by those described
in the profile of the account they are using will in this way be identified
as potential intruders.
d) Proactive Password Checking
The important problem of user password selection is addressed and
a proactive password checking technique is proposed. In a training
phase, a decision tree is generated based on a given dictionary of
weak passwords. Then, the decision tree is used to determine whether
a user password should be accepted. Experimental results described
here show that the method leads to very high dictionary compression
(from 100 to 3 in the average) with low error rates (of the order
of 1%). We survey previous approaches to proactive password checking,
and provide an in-depth comparison. EnFilter, a tool based on that
technique, is also available.
e) Lightweight Security for Internet Polls
We have investigated the security of Polls in an open Internet scenario,
where (1) clients cannot be customized or initialized in any way,
(2) remote networks have arbitrary architectures including possible
proxies and NAT, and (3) it is practically impossible to distribute
tokens or passwords. Another requirement is that IP locking cannot
be used, because it prevents a large number of legal votes. We have
developed a method that is not based on IP-locking and yet is secure
against automated attacks, that could massively change the result
of the poll.
f) Web Performance
The World Wide Web is one of the most used interfaces to access remote
data and commercial and non commercial services and the number of
actors involved in these transactions is growing very quickly. Everyone
using the Web, experiences how the connection to a popular web site
may be very slow during rush hours and it is well known that web users
tend to leave a site if the wait time for a page to be served exceeds
a given value. Therefore, performance and service quality attributes
have gained enormous relevance in service design and deployment. This
has led to the development of Web stressing tools largely available
in the market. One of the most common critics to this approach, is
that synthetic workload produced by web stressing tools is far to
be realistic. Moreover, Web sites need to be analysed for discovering
commercial rules and user profiles, and models must be extracted from
log files and monitored data. We deal with a methodology based on
the integrated usage of web mining techniques and standard web monitoring
and assessment tools. This is a joint research with CSP S.ca.r.l.
o G. Ballocca, P. Politi, G. Ruffo Integrated Techniques and Tools
for Web Mining, User Profiling and Benchmarking analysis in Proc.
of CMG'03 Roma (Italy).
b) CBMG Buider
Customer Behavior Model Graphs (CBMG) are largely use in Capacity
Planning when the system under test is a Web Farm. We implemented
a tool which gives web analysts the chance to automatically extract
CBMGs from log files and other information available at server side.
a) WebMinds (FIRB)
We are granted by the Italian Ministry of Education and Research (FIRB
research fund). WebMinds is the acronym for Wide-scalE, Broadband,
MIddleware for Network Distributed Services.
b) WTLAB (CSP)
CSP S.ca.r.l. granted our research in the field of Web Technolgy.
c) Computer and Network Security
Local University Grant.
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Last update:
May 05, 2004 |
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