Paper 7: Security In The Cloud

Title: Security In The Cloud
Author: Gary Anthes
Link: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1839676.1839683

In this article, Gary Anthes discussed several different aspects of network security in a cloud environment. He spoke with representatives from HP and IBM who discussed the security and management benefits of server virtualization. Unlike traditional server setups, virtualized machines can be cloned, migrated, and backuped without the user ever realizing anything unusual is going on.

In the second half of the article, Anthes discussed the difficulties of server side encryption. For example, when a user submits their credentials to log into a server, the username/password database needs to be decrypted first. These constant decryptions can give a performance hit to the sever, as well as make things insecure if the server were to be attacked.

Paper 6: Automating GUI Testing for Android Applications

Title: Automating GUI Testing for Android Applications
Authors: Cuixiong Hu, Iulian Neamtiu
Link: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1982595.1982612

The researchers of this paper did a two fold study of Android bugs. First, they performed a study to analyze and categorize the most common Android bugs. The second portion of their study was to develop a way to analyze, detect, and test the most common GUI, Android-specific bugs. They used JUnit as their unit tester in the study, and used many of it's built in functions.

The results of their research was highly promising. Their new unit tester did not miss any previously detected bugs, and observed several new ones. The tester particularly was good at finding Action errors, though it wasn't as effective on Event errors.