As digital content becomes more prevalent in the home, nontechnical users are increasingly interested in sharing that content with others and accessing it from multiple devices. Not much is known about how these users think about controlling access to this data. To better understand this, we conducted semi-structured, in-situ interviews with 33 users in 15 households. We found that users create ad-hoc accesscontrol mechanisms that do not always work; that their ideal policies are complex and multi-dimensional; that a priori policy specification is often insufficient; and that people's mental models of access control and security are often misaligned with current systems. We detail these findings and present a set of associated guidelines for designing usable access-control systems for the home environment.

Elastic storage systems can be expanded or contracted to meet current demand, allowing servers to be turned off or used for other tasks. However, the usefulness of an elastic distributed storage system is limited by its agility: how quickly it can increase or decrease its number of servers. Due to the large amount of data they must migrate during elastic resizing, state of the art designs usually have to make painful trade-offs among performance, elasticity, and agility.This article describes the state of the art in elastic storage and a new system, called SpringFS, that can quickly change its number of active servers, while retaining elasticity and performance goals. SpringFS uses a novel technique, termed bounded write offloading, that restricts the set of servers where writes to overloaded servers are redirected. This technique, combined with the read offloading and passive migration policies used in SpringFS, minimizes the work needed before deactivation or activation of servers. Analysis of real-world traces from Hadoop deployments at Facebook and various Cloudera customers and experiments with the SpringFS prototype confirm SpringFS's agility, show that it reduces the amount of data migrated for elastic resizing by up to two orders of magnitude, and show that it cuts the percentage of active servers required by 67-82%, outdoing state-of-the-art designs by 6-120%.

The well known multiple letter encryption cipher is the Playfair cipher. Here the digrams in the plaintext are treated as single units and converted into corresponding cipher text digrams. However because of the drawbacks inherent in the 5*5 Playfair cipher which adversely affects the security we proposed an 8*8 Playfair cipher. For details one can refer to [1]. This paper analyses the new proposed system. For this we have carried out cryptanalysis and through the avalanche effect we find out that the proposed cipher is a strong one.

Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) security has become a challenging issue now days because of its integration with the external networks, remote system, and internet world. Today's metering infrastructure employs computer based monitoring and control operations to enable application of one network to exchange data with other application of different network. Communication protocol, network topologies, and computerization plays crucial roles to make the metering infrastructure advanced and further make a grid smarter. On the other hand, cyber attacks already associated with such computer networks and communication protocol can easily affect the communication of AMIapplications. Therefore, from trespasser point of view, in this paper, we explore the various possible types of undesirable security threats followed by desirable security attributes required for the AMI. The paper further describes and implements a signature based station-to-station protocol for exchanging the secret shared keys among the AMI applications to get rid from undesirable security threats.

Users often have rich and complex photo-sharing preferences, but properly configuring access control can be difficult and time-consuming. In an 18-participant laboratory study, we explore whether the keywords and captions with which users tag their photos can be used to help users more intuitively create and maintain access-control policies. We find that (a) tags created for organizational purposes can be repurposed to create efficient and reasonably accurate access-control rules; (b) users tagging with access control in mind develop coherent strategies that lead to significantly more accurate rules than those associated with organizational tags alone; and (c) participants can understand and actively engage with the concept of tag-based access control.