Óscar Cánovas Reverte

Payment Annotations for Web Service Description Language (PA-WSDL)

Nowadays the use of Web Services is based on two approaches. The first approach is the use of web services freely and the second one is a restricted use of services based on payment, subscription or any other method based on a commercial agreement. However, for this last approach, the information related to the payment, and therefore needed to use the service, is not provided along with the description of the service. This fact limits the discovery of web services in automated- way because this information is usually provided in web pages. In this paper, we describe how to include payment information in Web Services Description Language (WSDL), WS-Policy and Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) for those services that require a payment.

A Proposal of a CIM-Based Policy Management Model for the OGSA Security Architecture

This paper describes an information model based on CIM (Common Information Model) for the policy-based management of the OGSA (Open Grid Services Architecture) security services, and shows a case of study for the authorization service. Currently, OGSA defines a set of security services and presents a management infrastructure based on policies, but there is no definition of a management model to be used over it. The lack of such a model makes difficult to build an efficient, well-integrated security management system. However, a model based on a well-recognized standard, such as CIM, enables the management of these security services in a uniform manner. CIM includes schemes for several areas such as User and Security for the identity and privilege management, and Policy for if-then rules and their groupings and applicability. Moreover, CIM is extensible and can be easily adapted to new OGSA security services and/or requirements that could be defined in the future.

SPEED Protocol: Smartcard-Based Payment with Encrypted Electronic Delivery

In these times of the dawning of e-commerce, many issues and barriers still remain to be solved before electronic transactions over the Web can be expected to be really successful. One important unresolved problem is the issue of having efficient and secure payment models based on e-purses and including electronic product delivery and price negotiation. In response to this need, the SPEED protocol specification has been proposed. This specification, which is described in this paper, provides a high level of security for all parties involved in e-commerce transactions over the Internet; at the same time, we have combined this aim with the use of highly-recognised standards and all the advantages of using e-purses implemented on multiaplication smart cards. Our work has also been tested in a real environment, providing us an interesting feedback based on technical and user-friendly matters.

An Evaluation of Parallel Computing in PC Clusters with Fast Ethernet

Currently, clusters of Personal Computers (PCs) with sharing Fast Ethernet may offer a significant price/performance ratio in parallel processing. This paper presents a study of the promising possibilities of parallelism in this environment, using both a classical numerical method to solve a differential equation and an innovative algorithm to solve the statistical problem of density estimation. In addition, and to compare, some comparisons with an IBM SP2 are carried out.

Learning Technological Innovation on Mobile Applications by Means of a Spiral of Projects

Teaching information and communication technologies (ICT) is a challenging task, especially when we focus on technological innovation. This work presents a learning experience for students with different backgrounds, such as Advertising, Audiovisual Communication, Journalism, Engineering, and Documentation. They are pursuing a Master’s degree on Mobile Communications and Digital Contents, an interdisciplinary course combining subjects from Communication Science and Computer Science. Due to the lack of knowledge about the details of several information technologies, especially those related to the mobile ecosystem, it was decided to follow a student-driven approach. Project-Based Learning (PBL), refined using a methodology called spiral of projects, would help to develop their own interests, which would be mainly based on their previous education. This paper describes the main features of the different stages composing the methodology and also the results of this successfully implemented experience, as well as a discussion about the suitability of this approach for other areas.

Different Smartcard-Based Approaches to Physical Access Control

Although the basic function of physical access control can be considered simple, that is, to allow authorized personnel to gain access to buildings and deny unauthorized entry, the problem should not be so drastically simplified. In this work, we present two solutions to this problem that make use of special devices named TICA and smartcards. These proposals follow different approaches to manage permissions and authorizations. On the one hand, we present a centralized and on-line solution that makes use of one central database containing the privileges assigned to every user. On the other hand, we describe a system where the authorization-related information is managed in a distributed way. It is an off-line solution based on a RBAC (Role Based Access Control) model that has been designed using authorization certificates.