For many decades multi-party computation (MPC) had been a predominantly theoretic endeavour in cryptography, but in recent years interest has arisen on the practical side. This has resulted in various implementation improvements and such protocols are becoming more applicable to practical situations. A key part in this transformation from theory to practice is in adapting theoretical protocols …
To understand what cloud computing is and is not, it is important to understand how this model of computing has evolved. As Alvin Toffler notes in his famous book, The Third Wave (Bantam, 1980), civilization has progressed in waves (three of them to date: the first wave was agricultural societies, the second was the industrial age, and the third is the information age). Within each wave, there …
Firewalls have ample recognition as key elements in the field of protecting networks. Even though this is not a new subject, many important concepts and resources that could be helpful to designing a secure network are often overlooked or even ignored. This book is targeted at unveiling the potential of Cisco Firewall functionalities and prod- ucts and how they can be grouped on a structured …
You may have some experience with vi, or what is now known as Vim (which is when simply put—vi improved). All too often, I find that those first experiences have never been good ones or to be looked back upon with much fondness. Guiding you through the initially unfathomable regime of vi, we are going to make sure that you are the master of vi and you leave wanting to use this tool from the g…
Enterprise application development over the decades has been a pendulum swinging back and forth between terminal and mainframe, between client and server. In the 1980s, business logic was largely pushed to the server by "dumb terminals" or "thin clients" which did very little except act as a middleman between the user and the server. Beginning in the 1990s, logic started to swing to the client…
The Raspberry Pi is a powerful, low-cost, credit-card sized computer, which lends itself perfectly as the controller of a sophisticated home security system. Using the available on-board interfaces, the Raspberry Pi can be expanded to allow the connection of a virtually infinite number of security sensors and devices. The Raspberry Pi has the processing power and interfaces available to build a…
In this chapter, we will cover the major components that almost all alarm systems have in common. By the end of the chapter you will realize that the so-called high tech alarm systems and access control systems are not really as complicated as some would like you to believe. That said, let's get started. Every alarm system in the world does two and only two basic things. • It monitors the wor…
In the social and behavioral sciences, statistics serve two general purposes. First, they can be used to describe what happened in a particular study (descriptive statistics). Second, they can be used to help draw conclu- sions about what those results mean in some broader context (inferential statistics). The main question in inferential statistics is whether a result, finding, or observation …
Boost.Asio is a complex library, making networking quite simple. Building it is easy. It's done quite a good job at avoiding use of macros; it's got a few macros to turn options on/off, but there's only quite a few you need to worry about. Boost.Asio allows for both synchronous and asynchronous programming. They are very different; you should choose one way or the other as early as possible,…
This is the least fun—but nevertheless critical—part of the book, where we walk through setting up an environ- ment in which to write and test Python. We are going to do a crash course in setting up a Kali Linux virtual machine (VM) and installing a nice IDE so that you have everything you need to develop code. By the end of this chapter, you should be ready to tackle the exer- cises and co…
Microsoft officially announced SQL Server 2008, codenamed Katmai, at the first Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI) conference in May 2007. I suppose I had the same reaction as many others — ‘‘Already?’’ SQL Server 2005 had only been released a year and a half earlier, and I started to wonder if it was too soon. I can’t tell you why I thought that. I also knew that it wasn’t unu…
Currently, computer networking has already become ubiquitous, the number of diverse devices is increasing constantly, as are also their capabilities, the range of applications and network-based services is expanding, and user expectations are rapidly evolving. This is the context in which the authors set the scene for this net- work programming book in its introductory chapter. The past decade…
APIs are becoming increasingly popular for exposing business functionalities to the rest of the world. According to an infographic published by Layer 7, 86.5% of organizations will have an API program in place in the next five years. Of those, 43.2% already have one. APIs are also the foundation of building communication channels in the Internet of Things (IoT). From motor vehicles to kitchen …
The aim of this book is to provide an introductory treatment of time series econometrics that builds upon the basic statistical and regression techniques contained in my Analysing Economic Data: A Concise Introduction.1 It is written from the perspective that the econometric analysis of economic and financial time series is of key importance to both students and practitioners of economics and s…
“The suspense was killing me. I just had to read it straight through!” Although these responses to our book would be gratifying, it’s doubtful that any book on digital security will ever garner this type of reaction. Digital security is the computer equivalent of disaster insurance. Few people care very much about it or give it much thought, and everyone hates paying for it … until a ca…
One of the many experiences I value from my time participating in the 802.11 working group is the ability to compare the “outside” view of a technology with the “inside” view of people in the engine room sweating to make it work. From the outside, wireless LANs have seen a steady progression in speeds from a megabit in the late 1990s to a gigabit with the first release of 802.11ac in 20…
It is a sad fact that much of the world is dominated by short-term thinking. And an in-depth look at the numerous problems that humanity now faces often reveals that the downside of allowing individuals or groups to do whatever they want (without considering future consequences) usually results in all of us paying dearly for it. Equally as true is that an increasing number of people and their…
Recently, the number of social networking sites is rapidly increasing, and the number of users joining these sites is dramatically increasing as well. This paper aims at comprehensively comparing three social networking sites, and provides an in-depth analysis. We compare three of the most popular social networking sites, i.e., Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. Specifically, we evaluate those soci…