Michal Trnka

Contextual understanding of microservice architecture: current and future directions

Current industry trends in enterprise architectures indicate movement from Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) to Microservices. By understanding the key differences between these two approaches and their features, we can design a more effective Microservice architecture by avoiding SOA pitfalls. To do this, we must know why this shift is happening and how key SOA functionality is addressed by key features of the Microservice-based system. Unfortunately, Microservices do not address all SOA shortcomings. In addition, Microservices introduce new challenges. This work provides a detailed analysis of the differences between these two architectures and their features. Next, we describe both research and industry perspectives on the strengths and weaknesses of both architectural directions. Finally, we perform a systematic mapping study related to Microservice research, identifying interest and challenges in multiple categories from a range of recent research.

On security level usage in context-aware role-based access control

Huge contemporary trend is adding context awareness into software applications. It allows both better user experience as well as a lot useful features for application owner. Nowadays, there are various approaches enabling particular context awareness but none of them concerns security. We tackle this problem and describe it further in the paper. Our solution extends role based access control with certain context awareness elements. Based on already existing solutions we propose own lightweight, universal solutions, which allows instant enhancement of current RBAC even in existing applications. The uniqueness of our solution is based on using security levels, which are granted to user based on his context. Security levels represents how the users can be trusted and are determined during users login procedure. The levels are used as additional security constrain so to access resources in application user need to have not only right permission granted through roles, but also to have corresponding level.

Identity Management of Devices in Internet of Things Environment

Significant interest in internet of things drives both research and industry production these days. A lot of important questions has been solved but some remain opened. One of the essential unresolved issue is the identity management of single devices. This paper proposes solution for management of devices for internet of things. The solution is based on central identity store. Each device has an associated account in the store with corresponding roles. For any communication the device retrieves OAuth 2.0 token and uses it to certify itself in every network connection. The proposed framework creates trusted environment and enables rapid response for any security events.

Towards Shared Security through Distributed Separation of Concerns

When considering distributed enterprise applications interacting with data, one can rarely omit its security concerns that must enforce data integrity and prevent users from disallowed actions. Current trends of application design tend to deal with permissions internally in each particular interacting application, although certain knowledge from the consumer application perspective is needed. This unfortunately leads to restated knowledge that fails to correlate in time, once a particular interacting application evolves or changes. This paper, considers how an convenient security sharing should look like in distributed enterprise system. Next, it puts the ideal case next to the context of existing approaches, which it surveys.

Aspect oriented context-aware and event-driven data processing for internet of things

The Internet of Things is currently getting significant interest from the scientific community. Academia and industry are both focused on moving ahead in attempts to put Internet of Things in practical use. Sensors and other devices in the Internet of Things networks generate tremendous amounts of data. Most of the times those data carry some contextual information and thus could be used for context-aware application. However, handling the vast amount of data becomes increasingly demanding task. In this article we propose event-driven solution for context-aware applications. In our method events are generated by Internet of Things devices and further propagated to subscribed actions. It support event filtering based on the data the event carries with him, like temperature or location. We demonstrate feasibility of our solution and compare it with traditional approach.

Using Wi-Fi Enabled Internet of Things Devices for Context-Aware Authentication

The increasing spread and adoption of the Internet of Things allows for novel methods to gather information about a user’s context, which can be used for enhanced authentication. In this article, we focus on context-aware authentication using information about Wi-Fi networks from a user’s wearables or nearables. We propose an additional factor for multi-factor authentication based on the other devices present on the same Wi-Fi network. Devices periodically discover all available peer MAC addresses. During subsequent authentication attempts, the network state is compared to previous network states saved under functionally similar conditions. If the devices on the network change significantly, a flag is raised and further action can be triggered. We also demonstrate the solution as a proof of concept.

Survey of Authentication and Authorization for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things is currently getting significant interest from the scientific community. Academia and industry are both focused on moving ahead in attempts to enhance usability, maintainability, and security through standardization and development of best practices. We focus on security because of its impact as one of the most limiting factors to wider Internet of Things adoption. Numerous research areas exist in the security domain, ranging from cryptography to network security to identity management. This paper provides a survey of existing research applicable to the Internet of Things environment at the application layer in the areas of identity management, authentication, and authorization. We survey and analyze more than 200 articles, categorize them, and present current trends in the Internet of Things security domain.

Context-Aware Security Using Internet of Things Devices

Current trends aim to extend software applications with context-awareness. Nowadays, there are already various approaches enabling security based on context, unfortunately there have limitations. However, the challenging topic is how to obtain as much context information about user as possible. Current progress in Internet of Things domain could be leveraged to obtain more context data. We propose a method to formalize context based on Internet of Things devices and use it for application context-aware security. Our approach is based on composition of a tree topology correlating to the user’s devices for recurring situations. Based on changes in the tree we determine unusual behavior, trigger events or invoke specific actions.

Context-aware Role-based Access Control Using Security Levels

Security of software applications is a very challenging and extensive topic. to keep up with the trend of personalized context aware applications the security design must adapt to it. this paper presents context awareness into the role based access control. it will describe already existing solutions, point out their key ideas and propose our rbac lightweight extension. it is universal and allows instant enhancement of current rbac even in current applications. the proposed solution is based on security levels which are assigned to users based on context. security levels represent how the users can be trusted and they are determined during the login procedure. the levels are used as additional security constraints to access resources. in application, the user needs to possesses not only the right permission granted through rbac roles, but also have a corresponding level.

On Aspect-Oriented Programming in Adaptive User Interfaces

Adaptive User Interfaces (AUIs) provide better usability, user satisfaction as well as personalized experience. AUIs bring broad benefits to end users, but their construction introduces numerous difficulties caused by extended development and maintenance efforts. One option to deal with the above problems is to generate various User Interface (UI) descriptions from a model or existing code. This paper considers the Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP)-based approach for the AUI design. Integrations of the approach with contemporary AUI frameworks, such as XML User Interface Language (XUL), User interface protocol (UIP) and JavaServer Faces (JSF) are compared from the perspective of the development and maintenance on a case study involving context- aware (CA) application. The outcome of this paper presents advantages, disadvantages and limitations of the particular frameworks for construction of AUIs.