i Declaration This thesis is my own account of the research carried out by myself in 2005. Abstract As systems are becoming more interconnected, software is becoming less trustworthy and users are increasingly at greater risk of attack. Most operating systems allow programs to run with the full set of a user's permissions and this can result in malicious code with the ability to act outside of ...

Modern virtual machines, such as Java and Inferno, are emerging as network computing platforms. While these virtual machines provide higher-level abstractions and more sophisticated services than their predecessors from twenty years ago, their architecture has essentially remained unchanged. State of the art virtual machines are still monolithic, that is, they are comprised of closely-coupled s...

Business rules (BR’s) play a critical role in an organization’s daily activities. With the increased use of BR (solutions) and ever increasing change frequency of BR’s the interest in modifiability guidelines that address the manageability of BR’s has increased as well. A method of approach to improve manageability and modifiability is to utilize architectures to structure BR’s. In current lite...

Management of safety, and barriers in particular, includes using information expressing performance, i.e. use safety performance indicators. For this to be useful, the indicators should demonstrate adequate quality. In other words, they satisfy some predefined set quality criteria. Without showing quality, are generally unable provide sufficient support for barrier management, which could resul...

We propose a smart medication dispenser having a high degree of scalability and remote manageability. We construct the dispenser to have extensible hardware architecture for achieving scalability, and we install an agent program in it for achieving remote manageability. The dispenser operates as follows: when the real-time clock reaches the predetermined medication time and the user presses the...

Key Management with Trusted Platform Modules The concept of Trusted Computing, which aims at making computing platforms more reliable, is based on a chip called Trusted Platform Module (TPM). The TPM is a chip which provides cryptographic functionality like RSA encryption and secure key storage. The aim of the Master’s project was to analyse and implement TPM based pre-boot authentication for t...

This paper focuses on the management aspects of Web service provision. We argue that support for manageability has to be considered at the design stage if services are to be capable of delivering high levels of quality of service for their users. Examples of the problems caused by lack of manageability include maintenance operations that necessitate service downtime, or difficulties in ensuring...

We propose a new connection management architecture for clustered Internet services called Active Connection Management (ACM) to improve the availability, quality of service, and manageability of Internet services. ACM extends the API of load-balancing switches to include application-level primitives. These primitives enable Internet services to manage loadbalancing switches dynamically to cont...

The cost and complexity of administration of large systems has come to dominate their total cost of ownership. Stateless and soft-state components, e.g. Web servers or network routers, are easy to manage: capacity can be scaled incrementally by adding more nodes, rebalancing of load after failover is easy, and reactive or proactive (“rolling”) reboots can be used to handle transient failures. W...