26263616
Developing a Formal Design Analysis Framework
1830896
A Communication Virtual Machine
The convergence of data, voice and multimedia communication over digital networks, coupled with continuous improvement in network capacity and reliability has significantly enriched the ways we communicate. However, the stovepipe approach used to develop today's communication applications and tools results in rigid technology, limited utility, lengthy and costly development cycle, difficulty in integration, and hinders innovation. In this paper, we present a fundamentally different approach, which we call communication virtual machine (CVM) to address these problems. CVM provides a user-centric, model-driven approach for conceiving, synthesizing and delivering communication solutions across application domains. We argue that CVM represents a far more effective paradigm for engineering communication solutions. The concept, architecture, modeling language, prototypical design and implementation of CVM are discussed
35219345
Integrated architectural modeling and analysis for high-assurance command and control system design
A real-time architectural specification (RAS) approach and its application to command and control (C2) systems are presented. The objective is to establish a formal foundation that will enable us to integrate existing rich but fragmented formal techniques for system specification and verification into practical and scaleable formal engineering methods to support the design and development of highly reliable real-time distributed systems. The contribution of RAS is twofold; first, it provides a formal system that integrates the system's timing requirements and the propagation of the requirements into the process of architectural modeling and design and provides a systematic way to enforce that the requirements are met in every step of the design process. Second, it offers an incremental and more scalable approach for design modeling. These two features together make RAS a suitable model for the design of C2 systems. Based on these features, we further present an incremental method for verifying timing properties of a RAS model that helps to reduce the complexity of analysis both at a given design level or across different design levels.
14940267
Integrating Software Engineering Methods and Petri Nets for the Specification and Prototyping of Complex Information Systems
We present a Petri net based framework called G-Net for the modular design of complex information systems. The motivation of this framework is to integrate Petri net theory with a modular, objectoriented approach for the specification and prototyping of complex software systems. We use the client/server example to illustrate the G-Net specification of distributed systems, and how such a specification can be translated into a Predicate/Transition net for formal analysis. The differences between G-Net and hierarchical Petri net, as well as some limitations of the transformation technique, are then discussed.
7511542
Towards a business continuity information network for rapid disaster recovery
Crisis Management and Disaster Recovery have gained immense importance in the wake of recent man and nature inflicted calamities such as the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001 and hurricanes/earthquakes i.e. Katrina (2005), Wilma (2005) and Indian Ocean Tsunami (2004). Most of the recent work has been conducted for crisis management under terrorist attacks and emergency management services under natural disasters with private business continuity and disaster recovery a secondary concern. In this paper, we propose a model for pre-disaster preparation and post-disaster business continuity/rapid recovery. The model is utilized to design and develop a web based prototype of our Business Continuity Information Network (BCIN) system facilitating collaboration among local, state, federal agencies and the business community for rapid disaster recovery. We present our model and prototype with Hurricane Wilma as the case study.
34616421
Performance analysis of traffic networks based on Stochastic Timed Petri Net models
A compositional method for modeling and evaluation of performance indices of traffic control systems based on Stochastic Timed Petri Nets (STPN) is presented. We use STPN to specify traffic and traffic control at an intersection and use a random distribution model to model the motion of vehicles in a road segment between any two consecutive intersections. The traffic control system is thus modeled as a composition of individual intersection models and segment distribution models. A technique is presented to incrementally evaluate the system's performance by analyzing intersections separately, according to a carefully selected order. The analysis technique conforms to the accepted practice of transportation research. Compared to existing Petri net models of traffic control systems, our technique dramatically reduces the complexity of analysis.
29907922
Intermediate Executable Architectural Specifications for KBSA, Part II
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
1960949
A symmetric patch-based correspondence model for occlusion handling
Occlusion is one of the challenging problems in stereo. In this paper, we solve the problem in a segment-based style. Both images are segmented, and we propose a novel patch-based stereo algorithm that cuts the segments of one image using the segments of the other, and handles occlusion areas in a proper way. A symmetric graph-cuts optimization framework is used to find correspondence and occlusions simultaneously. The experimental results show superior performance of the proposed algorithm, especially on occlusions, untextured areas and discontinuities
6786934
Concurrently Non-Malleable Zero Knowledge in the Authenticated Public-Key Model
We consider a type of zero-knowledge protocols that are of interest for their practical applications within networks like the Internet: efficient zero-knowledge arguments of knowledge that remain secure against concurrent man-in-the-middle attacks. As negative results in the area of concurrent non-malleable zero-knowledge imply that protocols in the standard setting (i.e., under no setup assumptions) can only be given for trivial languages, researchers have studied such protocols in models with setup assumptions, such as the common reference string (CRS) model. This model assumes that a reference string is honestly created at the beginning of all interactions and later available to all parties (an assumption that is satisfied, for instance, in the presence of a trusted party). A growing area of research in Cryptography is that of reducing the setup assumptions under which certain cryptographic protocols can be realized. In an effort to reduce the setup assumptions required for efficient zeroknowledge arguments of knowledge that remain secure against concurrent man-in-the-middle attacks, we consider a model, which we call the Authenticated Public-Key (APK) model. The APK model seems to significantly reduce the setup assumptions made by the CRS model (as no trusted party or honest execution of a centralized algorithm are required), and can be seen as a slightly stronger variation of the Bare Public-Key (BPK) model from [8, 30], and a weaker variation of the registered public-key model used in [3]. We then define and study man-in-the-middle attacks in the APK model. Our main result is a constant-round concurrent non-malleable zero-knowledge argument of knowledge for any polynomial-time relation (associated to a language in NP), under the (minimal) assumption of the existence of a one-way function family. We also show time-efficient instantiations of our protocol, in which the transformation from a 3-round honest-verifier zero-knowledge argument of knowledge to a 4-round concurrently non-malleable zero-knowledge argument of knowledge for the same relation incurs only O(1) (precisely, a small constant) additional modular exponentiations, based on known number-theoretic assumptions. Furthermore, the APK model is motivated by the consideration of some man-inthe-middle attacks in models with setup assumptions that had not been considered previously and might be of independent interest. We also note a negative result with respect to further reducing the setup assumptions of our protocol to those in the (unauthenticated) BPK model, by showing that concurrently non-malleable zero-knowledge arguments of knowledge in the BPK model are only possible for trivial languages.
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.