Dirk von Suchodoletz

Emulation: From Digital Artefact to Remotely Rendered Environments

Emulation used as a long-term preservation strategy offers the potential to keep digital objects in their original condition and experience them within their original computer environment. However, having just an emulator in place is not enough. To apply emulation as a fully fledged strategy, an automated and user-friendly approach is required. This cannot be done without knowledge and contextual information of the original software. This paper combines the existing concept of a view path, which captures the contextual information of software, together with new insights into improving the concept with extra metadata. It provides regularly updated instructions for archival management to preserve and access its artefacts. The view-path model requires extensions to the metadata set of the primary object of interest and depends on additionally stored secondary objects for environment recreation like applications or operating systems. This article also addresses a strategy of rendering digital objects by running emulation processes remotely. The advantage of this strategy is that it improves user convenience while maximizing emulation capability.

Emulation based services in digital preservation

The creation of most digital objects occurs solely in interactive graphical user interfaces which were available at the particular time period. Archiving and preservation organizations are posed with large amounts of such objects of various types. At some point they will need to process these automatically to make them available to their users or convert them to a commonly used format. A substantial problem is to provide a wide range of different users with access to ancient environments and to allow using the original environment for a given object. We propose an abstract architecture for emulation services in digital preservation to provide remote user interfaces to emulation over computer networks without the need to install additional software components. Furthermore, we describe how these ideas can be integrated in a framework of web services for common preservation tasks like viewing or migrating digital objects.

Towards Emulation-as-a-Service: Cloud Services for Versatile Digital Object Access

The changing world of IT services opens the chance to more tightly integrate digital long-term preservation into systems, both for commercial and end users. The emergence of cloud offerings re-centralizes services, and end users interact with them remotely through standardized (web-)client applications on their various devices. This offers the chance to use partially the same concepts and methods to access obsolete computer environments and allows for more sustainable business processes. In order to provide a large variety of user-friendly remote emulation services, especially in combination with authentic performance and user experience, a distributed system model and architecture is required, suitable to run as a cloud service, allowing for the specialization both of memory institutions and third party service providers. The shift of the usually non-trivial task of the emulation of obsolete software environments from the end user to specialized providers can help to simplify digital preservation and access strategies. Besides offering their users better access to their holdings, libraries and archives may gain new business opportunities to offer services to a third party, such as businesses requiring authentic reproduction of digital objects and processes for legal reasons. This paper discusses cloud concepts as the next logical step for accessing original digital material. Emulation-as-a-Service (EaaS) fills the gap between the successful demonstration of emulation strategies as a long term access strategy and it’s perceived availability and usability. EaaS can build upon the ground of research and prototypical implementations of previous projects, and reuse well established remote access technology. In this article we develop requirements and a system model, suitable for a distributed environment. We will discuss the building blocks of the core services as well as requirements regarding access management. Finally, we will try to present a business model and estimate costs to implement and run such a service. The implementations of EaaS will influence future preservation planning in memory institutions, as it shifts the focus on object access workflows.

Assessing location privacy in mobile communication networks

In this paper we analyze a class of location disclosure in which location information from individuals is generated in an automated way, i.e. is observed by a ubiquitous infrastructure. Since such information is valuable for both scientific research and commercial use, location information might be passed on to third parties. Users are usually aware neither of the extent of the information disclosure (e.g. by carrying a mobile phone), nor how the collected data is used and by whom. In order to assess the expected privacy risk in terms of the possible extent of exposure, we propose an adversary model and a privacy metric that allow an evaluation of the possible privacy loss by using mobile communication infrastructure. Furthermore, a case study on the privacy effects of using GSM infrastructure was conducted with the goal of analyzing the side effects of using a mobile handset. Based on these results requirements for a privacy-aware mobile handheld device were derived.

Emulation-as-a-Service - The Past in the Cloud

Until now, emulation of legacy architectures has mostly been seen as a tool for hobbyists and as technical nostalgia. However, in a world in which research and development is producing almost entirely digital artifacts, new and efficient concepts for preservation and re-use are required. Furthermore, a significant amount of todays cultural work is purely digital. Hence, emulation technology appeals to a wider, non-technical, user-group since many of our digital objects cannot be re-used properly without a suitable runtime environment. This article presents a scalable and cost-effective Cloud-based Emulation-as-a-Service (EaaS) architecture, enabling a wide range of non-technical users to access emulation technology in order to re-enact their digital belongings. Together with a distributed storage and data management model we present an implementation from the domain of digital art to demonstrate the practicability of the proposed EaaS architecture.

Reclaiming Location Privacy in Mobile Telephony Networks—Effects and Consequences for Providers and Subscribers

Mobile telephony (e.g., Global System for Mobile Communications [GSM]) is todays most common communication solution. Due to the specific characteristics of mobile communication infrastructure, it can provide real added value to the user and various other parties. Location information and mobility patterns of subscribers contribute not only to emergency planning, general safety, and security, but are also a driving force for new commercial services. However, there is a lack of transparency in todays mobile telephony networks regarding location disclosure. Location information is generated, collected, and processed without being noticed by subscribers. Hence, by exploiting subscriber location information, an individuals privacy is threatened. We develop a utility-based opponent model to formalize the conflict between the additional utility of mobile telephony infrastructure being able to locate subscribers and the individuals privacy. Based on these results, measures were developed to improve an individuals location privacy through a user-controllable GSM software stack. To analyze and evaluate the effects of specific subscriber provider interaction, a dedicated test environment will be presented, using the example of GSM mobile telephony networks. The resulting testbed is based on real-life hardware and open-source software to create a realistic and defined environment that includes all aspects of the air interface in mobile telephony networks and thus, is capable of controlling subscriber–provider interaction in a defined and fully controlled environment.

Testbed for Mobile Telephony Networks

Mobile telephony and mobile communication are both crucial and critical infrastructures for todays society and contribute to its security and safety. In contrast to landline telephony with its physically protectable medium, mobile telephony utilizes air and electromagnetic waves as communication medium, which cannot be easily protected. Due to the specific design and the openly shared medium, mobile communication infrastructure is particularly vulnerable to threats linked to a wide range of security issues and failures caused by overload and blocking. Especially in critical situations like human stampede or natural disasters, the network could break down while remaining physically intact. That is contrary to the desired behavior in catastrophe scenarios, as the infrastructure is meant to provide emergency call functionality and communication for the rescue teams. While traditional usage scenarios even for major events are well researched, there is a lack of knowledge on how to make mobile telephony networks more resilient to unpredictable load in disaster events. We propose a test environment to analyze such scenarios using the example of GSM mobile telephony networks. Furthermore, we identify relevant network parameters and discuss their impact on network resilience. The resulting test bed is based on real hardware and open-source software in order to create a realistic and defined environment which includes all aspects of the air interface in mobile telephony networks and is capable of simulating an overload situation in a defined and fully controlled environment.

Reliable preservation of interactive environments and workflows

The creation of most digital objects occurs solely in interactive graphical user interfaces which were available at a particular time period. Archiving and preservation organizations are posed with large amounts of such objects of various types. At some point they will need to automatically process these to make them available to their users or convert them to a commonly used format. We present methods and a system architecture for emulation services which enable the preservation of interactive environments and their workflows in a reliable manner. This system includes a framework for describing interactions with an interactive environment in an abstract manner, for supporting reliable playback in an automated way and finally for ensuring the preservation of specific operation knowledge by documenting and storing all components in a dedicated software archive.

A Practical Approach to System Preservation Workflows

Digital objects are often more complex than their common perception as individual files or small sets of files. Traditional methods of preserving these complex objects such as migration may not be suitable for maintaining access to them in an economically and technically feasible way. Many of today’s preservation scenarios would benefit from a change in our understanding of digital objects. Instead of focusing on single digital files or small groups of files as they are commonly conceived of, computer systems in full should be considered. The preservation community could benefit from widening its collecting scope to include complex objects such at scientific desktops, databases, machines running networked business processes or computers of famous people such as authors or politicians. Such objects are not just interesting in their own right but also have to potential to provide a more immersive and contextually rich experience than simpler digital object. In this paper we describe a workflow to be used for replicating installed application environments onto emulated or virtualized hardware, we discuss the potential for automating steps in the workflow and conclude by addressing some of the possible issues with this approach. We focus on the x86 architecture but we also discuss considerations for generalising the workflow to work with a wider range of architectures such as Macintoshes or Android smartphones.

Universal remote boot and administration service

Booting operating systems over the network is a well established method to simplify system administration in medium to large computer environments. Remote booting Linux and using PXE based environments for large scale system deployments are widely adopted by many system administrators. While scaling very well in controlled subnets they can not easily cross sub-network boundaries or co-exist with each other. Additionally it would be desirable to offer a wider range of standard services not only in dedicated sub-networks but on the whole enterprise infrastructure. This paper discusses advanced network booting methods overcoming the restrictions of traditional PXE/DHCP/TFTP setups. It suggests a new approach combining existing well established boot services into a more flexible framework for remote booting a wide range of operating systems and maintanance tools. A centralized boot configuration web-service is the universal, multi-purpose entry point of the architecture offering configurable, flexible boot menus for directly managed and arbitrary computers of unregistered users.