The unprecedented growing demands on security and privacy protection ushered the proliferation of cryptographic tools. This article presents a study on the performance comparison of cryptographic Application Program Interfaces (APIs) that are implemented for the Java and the .Net frameworks. The results of the study clearly indicate the superiority of a set of commercial cryptographic APIs over its open-source counterpart.

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Most application level fault tolerance schemes in literature are non-adaptive in the sense that the fault tolerance schemes incorporated in applications are usually designed without incorporating information from system environments such as the amount of available memory and the local or network I/O bandwidth. However, from an application point of view, it is often desirable for fault tolerant high performance applications to be able to achieve high performance under whatever system environment it executes with as low fault tolerance overhead as possibile.In this paper, we demonstrate that, in order to achieve high reliability with as low performance penalty as possible, fault tolerant schemes in applications need to be able to adapt themselves to different system environments. We propose a framework under which different fault tolerant schemes can be incorporated in applications using an adaptive method. Under this framework, applications are able to choose near optimal fault tolerance schemes at run time according to the specific characteristics of the platform on which the application is executing.

Steganography is the art of concealing messages through hidden data that is embedded in a carrier medium. Current steganalysis practices focus on detecting and recovering these pieces of hidden data. This paper focuses on instances when neither detecting nor recovering data is desirable, but on proactively cleansing the cover media from possible steganographic data. To support this need, a proof-of-concept steganography obliterator is designed and implemented to partially or completely remove the hidden message from possible media carriers such as image, video, and audio files.

Learning Objects are digital or non-digital entities, which can be used, re-used or referenced during technology supported learning. These Learning Objects include multimedia segments, interactive learning systems, instructional software tools, course contents, and course management systems. The challenge for education is to design these learning objects. These objects will draw both from knowledge about human cognition and from practical applications of how technology can facilitate complex learning and teaching tasks. This article describes the design and the implementation of two learning objects: the Web Enabled Basic Knowledge Accessibility Program (WEBKAP) and the Web Enabled Automated Test Generation and Management System (WEATGAMS). These tools are created with a common thread: to ameliorate the learning experiences of students.