Back from CCS/STC 2009

I arrived back last week after attending the 16th Conference on Computer Communications and Security (CCS09) and Fourth Annual Workshop on Scalable Trusted Computing (STC09) in Chicago, USA. The conference was really good and provided an opportunity that inspired very promising ideas. Hope to get some of them prepared for the future conferences. Take a look at my publications page for details on the paper in STC. You can also take a look at the JSR321 project (the target of this paper) here.

I was also able to take my camera with me there and managed to take some shots. You can take a look at them at my flickr ‘Chicago’ set.

Study smart with StudyBlue

StudyBlue offers a social networking approach to studying. You can create classes, add professors, join networks and share documents and class notes not only with your classmates but also with those from other colleges. Like all social networks, it requires that you bring your friends over or it wouldn’t be very helpful. However, it allows you to read the public notes of other members of the site and that might serve as a very useful feature even when you don’t have many of your friends joining the site.

Sign up for an account here: http://www.studyblue.com

CCS Submission Complete

We’ve completed our submission for ACM Conference on Computers and Communications Security (CCS2009). Like SACMAT08, this was exhilarating due to the amount of effort it requires just to get each and every sentence right and to fit everything in the allocated space. As expected, I can’t much say about the submission itself but this one was my idea and I was responsible for the whole thing.

We think the idea is really good and we presented it real well. But of course, with CCS, all bets are off.

End of an Era Coming Up

With Bill Gates already out of Microsoft and Steve Jobs taking a sick leave from Apple, I believe it’s the end of an era for consumer computing. It is my opinion that Jobs is about to leave Apple for good. They just wanted to soften the blow by letting him take a small leave instead of announcing the big departure. Stocks fell even as a result of this and even a rumour of a departure may have been catastrophic. Anyway, it seems that Steve Jobs will be gone and so will the era of desktop computing. Google’s often termed as the new Microsoft. The position for the new Apple is open and Android seems to be putting Google in that position as well. Is this going to be a single super-power situation?

GPS Functional on Openmoko

Today, we (actually, Shaz and Sanaullah) got GPS working in the Openmoko phone. We couldn’t get a fix inside the lab but we got one within a minute on the roof. The values didn’t seem to make sense at first but after a little thinking and tinkling, we got the map pointing towards the exact building, within feet of our actual location. A technical description of the procedure will follow soon on the group’s blog (inshaallah).

We’re still working on using the data inside our access decision engine. More on this (much) later.

Men under threat from ‘gender bending’ chemicals – Telegraph

According to Telegraph.co.uk:

Scientists are warning that manmade pollutants which have escaped into the environment mimic the female sex hormone oestrogen… The authors claim that the chemicals found in food packaging, cleaning products, plastics, sewage and paint cause genital deformities, reduce sperm count and “feminise” males.

So, there you go. Stop the pollution or you’ll all turn into girls.

Trusted Computing, Mobiles and the Project

I’ve been unable to write blog entries for a while now. It’s been mostly updates and rants and this post is more of the same. I’m working on stuff which, while not ‘confidential’, can’t be repeated in publicly accessible places due to various reasons. So, I can only provide updates and tell you what I can.

We’ve started working on our Dynamic Behavioral Attestation for Mobile Platforms project. We’ve had some tutorial sessions and we’re getting some human resource developed. If we can only convert some of this ‘human resource’ to productive people, we should be well on our way to competing with the Trusted Computing community leaders. Not that we’re not doing that already. It’s just that time is against us. With the exceptional hype surrounding Android, our work is getting more and more important. We need to come up with tangible results very soon.

I’ve also submitted a paper for Trust 2009 (scheduled for April of next year at Oxford). Let’s see what becomes of that. JSR321 (Trusted Computing for the Java Platforms) is also underway. And finally, we’ve been working on a book. That should be published in around five to six months.

Ididwork.com

We’ve been trying to find a solution for managing out team and the time spent on the projects by each team members. I’ve come across ididwork.com but it still lacks one thing. There’s no way of reporting the hours spent on each task. Add that and it will be everything we need.

ididwork – The work log that shares

Using Tables with LaTeX

Using tables with LaTeX is a little tricky. The good thing is, once you get the hang of it, it’s really very clean. Here’s a crash-tutorial on how to use tables.

We want to make this table:

Cat/Term	apple	recipe	pudding
COOKING	1	0.37	0.37
SOCCER	0	0	0

And here’s the code to do it:

\begin{table}
    \centering
    \begin{tabular}{|l|c|c|c|}
        \hline
        Cat/Term & apple  & recipe    & pudding \\ \hline
        COOKING  & 1      & 0.37      & 0.37    \\ \hline
        SOCCER   & 0      & 0         & 0       \\ \hline
    \end{tabular}
    \caption{Example representation of a user profile}
    \label{fig:sampleM}
\end{table}

Most of this is self-explanatory if you know a little LaTeX. I’ll give a short guide on the rest. (Feel free to ask if you have any problems.)

The {|l|c|c|c|} means that there should be four columns: first one left aligned and the rest centered. Between each column, there should be a line. Try removing one of these pipes to see the difference.

The first \hline is used to insert a line at the top of the table.

Then, each line represents a row with the ampersands marking the column separations.

Each \hline at the end of rows means there should be a line between the rows. Try removing one of these to see what it does.

Of course, the \\ means line break; or in this case, row break.

Hope this helps.

Windows Live Writer

I simply can’t find a blog posting software good enough to be used with wordpress. WordPress’ dashboard itself is just not fast enough – especially on my 56k dialup. Let’s see if this post (using Windows Live Writer) turns out to be ok.