Data protection

Today's Personal Computers (PC) do more work and hence hold more important and meaningful data than before. This demands the necessity of better PC data protection services. In this concern we surveyed three major PC data protection tools, namely, Seagate Corporation's Client-Exec, Computer Associates Cheyenne Backup, Xpoint Technologies Uptime and analyzed them in terms of Restore Time and Total Cost of Ownership. Though these standalone tools are good in terms of PC data protection, IT managers still prefer Enterprise tools because they offer better services in terms of usability, manageability and platform independency. Combining the two tools will benefit each other. Hence we developed a solution to this problem by integrating these two types of tools. Integration of third party products with System Management Server (SMS) extended its services. But in order to make this integration generic, independent of the Enterprise tool, Web Based Enterprise Management integration strategy is adopted. Integration with Adstar Distributed Storage Manager (ADSM) extended services of the third party product. Integration of third party products with SMS and ADSM combined the benefits of the two and WBEM integration showed that this is the future direction.

Microprocessor design for data security is examined with regard to both methodology and implementation. The examination begins with seven commercial 32-bit microprocessors which are evaluated against a set of previously published requirements for secure hardware. Then, the methodology and implementation of data secure microprocessor design is presented using an original design. The presentation includes a description of the security policy implemented, a model of secure operation, and a detailed description of the design. The security-related overhead of the new design is compared to that of two commercial microprocessors. The design is then validated with a formal proof. Finally, the design is shown to protect against several generic attacks.

In our society, large volumes of documents are exchanged on a daily basis. Since documents can easily be scanned, modified and reproduced without any loss in quality, unauthorized use and modification of documents is of major concern. An authentication watermark embedded into a document as an invisible, fragile mark can be used to detect illegal document modification. However, the authentication watermark can only be used to determine whether documents have been tampered with, and additional protection may be needed to prevent unauthorized use and distribution of those documents. A solution to this problem is a two-level, multipurpose watermark. The first level watermark is an authentication mark used to detect document tampering, while the second level watermark is a robust mark, which identifies the legitimate owner and/or user of specific document. This dissertation introduces a new adaptive two-level multipurpose watermarking scheme suitable for binary document images, such as scanned text, figures, engineering and road maps, architectural drawings, music scores, and handwritten text and sketches. This watermarking scheme uses uniform quantization and overlapped embedding to add two watermarks, one robust and the other fragile, into a binary document image. The two embedded watermarks serve different purposes. The robust watermark carries document owner or document user identification, and the fragile watermark confirms document authenticity and helps detect document tampering. Both watermarks can be extracted without accessing the original document image. The proposed watermarking scheme adaptively selects an image partitioning block size to optimize the embedding capacity, the image permutation key to minimize watermark detection error, and the size of local neighborhood in which modification candidate pixels are scored to minimize visible distortion of watermarked documents. Modification candidate pixels are scored using a novel, objective metric called the Structural Neighborhood Distortion Measure (SNDM). Experimental results confirm that this watermarking scheme, which embeds watermarks by modifying image pixels based on their SNDM scores, creates smaller visible document distortion than watermarking schemes which base watermark embedding on any other published pixel scoring method. Document tampering is detected successfully and the robust watermark can be detected even after document tampering renders the fragile watermark undetectable.