In the age of widening gaps between the Non-Recurring Engineering (NRE) and Recurring Engineering (RE) costs of developing and manufacturing Integrated Circuit (IC) products, and the increasing prevalence of smart and connected embedded devices in daily lives, ensuring the safety of the device vendor's hardware and software Intellectual Properties (IPs) and the integrity of the embedded software is an imperative and complex task. There exist separate protection schemes that target the security of the hardware, software, and runtime aspects of the embedded systems, but they often have separate overhead requirements on area, power, and performance of the system.

I propose a comprehensive protection scheme that addresses the security of hardware IP, software IP, and runtime system together in the context of the embedded systems. The key idea is to incorporate Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) in the hardware design and the software authoring process of the devices. My thesis focuses on the creation and the characterization of the PUFs and different techniques of incorporating them into embedded system designs.

Though skyline queries already have claimed their place in retrieval over central databases, their application in Web information systems up to now was impossible due to the distributed aspect of retrieval over Web sources. But due to the amount, variety and volatile nature of information accessible over the Internet extended query capabilities are crucial. We show how to efficiently perform distributed skyline queries and thus essentially extend the expressiveness of querying today's Web information systems. Together with our innovative retrieval algorithm we also present useful heuristics to further speed up the retrieval in most practical cases paving the road towards meeting even the real-time challenges of on-line information services. We discuss performance evaluations and point to open problems in the concept and application of skylining in modem information systems. For the curse of dimensionality, an intrinsic problem in skyline queries, we propose a novel sampling scheme that allows to get an early impression of the skyline for subsequent query refinement.