12388597
Formal analysis of software security system architectures
We present an approach for analysis of security system architecture. Constraint patterns are introduced to formally specify the generic form of security policies that all implementations of the system architecture must enforce. The analysis is driven by incrementally decomposing a system-wide constraint pattern into a set of constraint patterns of constituent components. Since there are potentially many ways to partition a security system, a key element of the analysis is to verify that the component constraint patterns are collectively consistent with the global constraint pattern under the given architecture. A "consistent" component constraint is then used as the basis for analyzing possible designs of the component. We show that our approach is both flexible and scalable, which not only ensures the consistency of critical early design decisions, but also provides a framework to guide correct implementations of the design.
14596334
A formal approach to designing secure software architectures
Software architecture plays a central role in developing software systems that provide basic functionality and satisfy critical properties such as reliability and security. However, little has been done to formally model software architectures and to systematically enforce required properties. We aim to propose a formal approach to designing secure software architectures. We use the software architecture model (SAM), a general software architecture model combining Petri nets and temporal logic, as the underlying formalism. Architecture design consists of the functionality part and the security part. Guidelines are proposed to design functionality of software architectures at both element level and composition level. Software security is enforced by stepwise refinement.
13531819
A visual approach to XML document design and transformation
This paper presents a visual approach to the representation and validation of multimedia document structures specified in XML and transformation of one structure to another. The underlying theory of our approach is a context-sensitive graph grammar formalism. The paper demonstrates the conciseness and expressiveness of the graph grammar formalism. An example XML structure is provided and its graph grammar representation, validation and transformation to a multimedia representation are presented.
26263616
Developing a Formal Design Analysis Framework
9746543
Design an Interoperable Mobile Agent System Based on Predicate Transition Net Models
Mobile agents provide an effective and flexible style to develop advanced distributed systems. In order to promote interoperability and ensure the quality of mobile agent systems, it is necessary to formalize software architecture of mobile agent systems. In this paper, we not only define the software architecture of interoperable mobile agent systems using predicate transition nets, but also analyze the interoperability between agents. In addition, a formal model-driven design method to develop mobile agent systems is described with examples. Our method naturally integrates formal methods and practical approaches in the agent system design phase. The method can be used to develop other complex software systems as well.
24822225
Achieving a Better Middleware Design through Formal Modeling and Analysis
3145299
Resettable Zero Knowledge in the Bare Public-Key Model under Standard Assumption
In this paper we resolve an open problem regarding resettable zero knowledge in the bare public-key (BPK for short) model: Does there exist constant round resettable zero knowledge argument with concurrent soundness for $\mathcal{NP}$ in BPK model without assuming \emph{sub-exponential hardness}? We give a positive answer to this question by presenting such a protocol for any language in $\mathcal{NP}$ in the bare public-key model assuming only collision-resistant hash functions against \emph{polynomial-time} adversaries.
45463269
Building Global Ecosystem for Collaborative Computing Research and Education
A knock-down tank for containing a liquid medium having a bottom panel, multiple side panels and a top panel secured together by fasteners inside the tank and insulated against heat transfer, the tank being made liquid tight by a plastic liner, and the top panel supporting a depending dip tube assembly whose tubes provide the only access to the liquid contained within the liner.
14201767
Stereo Correspondence with Occlusion Handling in a Symmetric Patch-Based Graph-Cuts Model
A novel patch-based correspondence model is presented in this paper. Many segment-based correspondence approaches have been proposed in recent years. Untextured pixels and boundaries of discontinuities are imposed with hard constraints by the discontinuity assumption that large disparity variation only happens at the boundaries of segments in the above approaches. Significant improvements on performance of untextured and discontinuity area have been reported. But, the performance near occlusion is not satisfactory because a segmented region in one image may be only partially visible in the other one. To solve this problem, we utilize the observation that the shared edge of a visible area and an occluded area corresponds to the discontinuity in the other image. So, the proposed model conducts color segmentation on both images first and then a segment in one image is further cut into smaller patches corresponding to the boundaries of segments in the other when it is assigned with a disparity. Different visibility of patches in one segment is allowed. The uniqueness constraint in a segment level is used to compute the occlusions. An energy minimization framework using graph-cuts is proposed to find a global optimal configuration including both disparities and occlusions. Besides, some measurements are taken to make our segment-based algorithm suffer less from violation of the discontinuity assumption. Experimental results have shown superior performance of the proposed approach, especially on occlusions, untextured areas, and near discontinuities
207130140
Guest Editors' Introduction: Special Issue on Embedded Software Engineering
Embedded systems, typically components of larger electro-mechanical systems with the purpose of controlling or helping such systems to achieve their overall goals, are playing an increasingly critical role in modern society and economy. According to David Tennenhouse, Chief Scientist of Intel and former director of DARPA ISO, 98% of all current computer applications are embedded systems. The market for embedded computer applications has shown explosive growth with tremendous applications in, for example, telecommunications, health-care, manufacturing, remote monitoring, and transportation, to name a few. An important trend is that embedded systems are becoming increasingly complex, software-intensive and distributed. For instance, it was projected that software written for cellular phones will reach from 2 to 5 million lines of code in the next few years. While this underscores the growing importance of software it also raises some concerns since methods of developing embedded software are lagging far behind hardware advances. The unique characteristics of embedded systems, such as complex control logic, severe limitations on resources (e.g. memory and power consumption), hard real-time constraints, and stringent performance and dependability requirements, are stressing the limits of mainstream architectures, languages, tools, and techniques. Much of the embedded software development today depends on intensive manual programming and costly yet error-prone testing methods for quality assurance. Further, current embedded software development techniques use monolithic designs which are not scalable, configurable, or adaptable. These problems have resulted in long product cycles, cost overruns, and poor system quality. These problems, if not addressed, will escalate, and significantly hinder the development and deployment of complex embedded systems. This special issue on embedded software engineering is aimed at stimulating research interests in this important emerging area, which merges software engineering methodologies and techniques with embedded system development techniques. After careful reviews, five papers were selected for the special issue. Collectively,
280798
Instance-Dependent Verifiable Random Functions and Their Application to Simultaneous Resettability
We introduce a notion of instance-dependent verifiable random functions(InstD-VRFs for short). Informally, an InstD-VRF is, in some sense, a verifiable random function [23] with a special public key, which is generated via a (possibly)interactiveprotocol and contains an instance y? L? {0,1}*for a specific NP language L, but the security requirements on such a function are relaxed: we only require the pseudorandomnessproperty when y? Land only require the uniquenessproperty when y? L, instead of requiring both pseudorandomness and uniqueness to hold simultaneously. We show that this notion can be realized under standard assumption. 
 
Our motivation is the conjecture posed by Barak et al.[2], which states there exist resettably-sound resettable zero knowledge arguments for NP. The instance-dependent verifiable random functions is a powerful tool to tackle this problem. We first use them to obtain two interesting instance-dependent argument systems from the Barak's public-coin bounded concurrent zero knowledge argument [1], and then, we 
 
 1 Construct the first(constant round) zero knowledge arguments for NP enjoying a certainsimultaneous resettability under standard hardness assumptions in the plain model, which we call bounded-class resettable ZK arguments with weak resettable-soundness Though the malicious party (prover or verifier) in such system is limited to a kind of bounded resetting attack, We put NO restrictions on the number of the total resets made by malicious party. 
 1 show that, under standard assumptions, if there exist public-coin concurrent zero knowledge arguments for NP, there exist the resettably-sound resetable zero knowledge arguments for NP.