1978753
A security characterisation framework for trustworthy component based software systems
This paper explores how to characterize security properties of software components, and how to reason about their suitability for a trustworthy compositional contract. Our framework provides an explicit opportunity for software composers as well as software components to test a priori security properties of software components in a system composition. The proposed framework uses logic programming as a tool to represent security properties of atomic components and reason about their compositional matching with other components. This enables software components as well as composers to "test" possible matches and mismatches between the security properties of the candidate components and the security requirements of the enclosing applications systems.
14721307
Specifying Interaction Constraints of Software Components for Better Understandability and Interoperability
A vital issue in the correct use of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components is the proper understanding of their functionality, quality attributes and ways of operation. Traditionally, COTS component vendors provide some of this information in accompanying documentation. However, the documentation is often informal and likely contains ambiguous and inconsistent statements. Even equipped with interface descriptions clearly defining the basic aspects of component use, such as operation signatures and operating platforms, this documentation does not provide a mathematically sound means for addressing the behavioural interoperability issues in component-based system design. In this paper, we propose a formal but user-friendly component specification approach which augments commercial IDLs with the capability of capturing component interoperability requirements. This approach uses unambiguous temporal operators to define sequencing and concurrency constraints between component operation invocations. Accordingly, it enables precise specifications of how a component provides its services and the correct way in which its services should be used.
52184467
International workshop on service oriented software engineering (IW-SOSE'06)
International workshop on service oriented software engineering (IW-SOSE'06) : In Proceeding of the 28th international Conference on Software Engineering (Shanghai, China, May 20 - 28, 2006). ICSE '06.
1659291
A Software Engineering Perspective for Services Security
Services are usually developed and deployed independently; and systems can be formed by composing relevant services to achieve set goals. In such an open and dynamic environment, security is of paramount importance. We have seen much work in the traditional area of information and network security, focusing on developing various security techniques. More recently, there have been efforts in integrating the security techniques into languages and infrastructural support that are used for developing services and systems. In fact, the development of services and the composition of service-based systems are software engineering activities. As such, they need to be viewed from a software engineering perspective. In this paper, we introduce an approach to services security engineering, to answer the questions like what the security properties of services and service-based systems are and how they meet the user’s security requirements. It deals with the issues of (1) security property characterisation for services, (2) compositional security analysis for service-based systems, and (3) certification of services.
10149363
A comparative analysis of architecture frameworks
Architecture frameworks are methods used in architecture modeling. They provide a structured and systematic approach to designing systems. To date there has been little analysis on their roles in system and software engineering and if they are satisfactory. This study provides a model of understanding through analyzing the goals, inputs and outcomes of six architecture frameworks. It characterizes two classes of architecture frameworks and identifies some of their deficiencies. To overcome these deficiencies, we propose to use costs, benefits and risks for architecture analysis. We also propose a method to delineate architecture activities from detailed design activities.
686092
Consistency and interoperability checking for component interaction rules
In component-based software development, it is important to ensure interoperability between components based on their unambiguous semantic descriptions, in order to obtain a viable system. A body of recent work has explored the use of formal languages in specifying component interaction protocols for interoperability checking, but lacks the practicality required by software practitioners for daily use. Faced with this, we have developed a lightweight specification approach to component interaction rules, which has the necessary expressiveness and employs event patterns in rule specification for easy adoption by practitioners. In this paper, we present a FSA-based semantic model for such rules and novel studies of rule consistency and system-wide protocol interoperability for components annotated with interaction rules. We also develop incremental approaches and tools to check these properties, which provide an effective means to discover errors in the design of component interaction rules and component-based system architectures.
101070
Mining coherent dense subgraphs across massive biological networks for functional discovery
MOTIVATION
The rapid accumulation of biological network data translates into an urgent need for computational methods for graph pattern mining. One important problem is to identify recurrent patterns across multiple networks to discover biological modules. However, existing algorithms for frequent pattern mining become very costly in time and space as the pattern sizes and network numbers increase. Currently, no efficient algorithm is available for mining recurrent patterns across large collections of genome-wide networks.


RESULTS
We developed a novel algorithm, CODENSE, to efficiently mine frequent coherent dense subgraphs across large numbers of massive graphs. Compared with previous methods, our approach is scalable in the number and size of the input graphs and adjustable in terms of exact or approximate pattern mining. Applying CODENSE to 39 co-expression networks derived from microarray datasets, we discovered a large number of functionally homogeneous clusters and made functional predictions for 169 uncharacterized yeast genes.


AVAILABILITY
http://zhoulab.usc.edu/CODENSE/
40646697
HAND: An Overlay Optimization Algorithm in Peer-to-Peer Systems
Recently, peer-to-peer (P2P) model becomes popular due to its outstanding resource sharing ability in large-scale distributed systems. However, the most popular P2P system – unstructured P2P system, suffers greatly from the mismatching between the logical overlay and physical topology. This mismatching problem causes a large volume of redundant traffic, which makes peer-to-peer system far from scalable and degrades their search efficiency dramatically. In this paper we address the mismatching problem in an unstructured P2P architecture by developing a distributed overlay optimizing algorithm – HAND (Hops Adaptive Neighbor Discovery). Through comprehensive simulations, we show that HAND significantly outperforms previous approaches, especially in large-scale P2P systems.
15256739
Performance prediction for individual recognition by gait
Existing gait recognition approaches do not give their theoretical or experimental performance predictions. Therefore, the discriminating power of gait as a feature for human recognition cannot be evaluated. In this paper, we first propose a kinematic-based approach to recognize human by gait. The proposed approach estimates 3D human walking parameters by performing a least squares fit of the 3D kinematic model to the 2D silhouette extracted from a monocular image sequence. Next, a Bayesian-based statistical analysis is performed to evaluate the discriminating power of extracted stationary gait features. Through probabilistic simulation, we not only predict the probability of correct recognition (PCR) with regard to different within-class feature variance, but also obtain the upper bound on PCR with regard to different human silhouette resolution. In addition, the maximum number of people in a database is obtained given the allowable error rate. This is extremely important for gait recognition in large databases.
1695422
New Public-Key Cryptosystem Using Braid Groups
The braid groups are infinite non-commutative groups naturally arising from geometric braids. The aim of this article is twofold. One is to show that the braid groups can serve as a good source to enrich cryptography. The feature that makes the braid groups useful to cryptography includes the followings: (i) The word problem is solved via a fast algorithm which computes the canonical form which can be efficiently manipulated by computers. (ii) The group operations can be performed efficiently. (iii) The braid groups have many mathematically hard problems that can be utilized to design cryptographic primitives. The other is to propose and implement a new key agreement scheme and public key cryptosystem based on these primitives in the braid groups. The efficiency of our systems is demonstrated by their speed and information rate. The security of our systems is based on topological, combinatorial and group-theoretical problems that are intractible according to our current mathematical knowledge. The foundation of our systems is quite different from widely used cryptosystems based on number theory, but there are some similarities in design.
6112726
Pseudo Trust: Zero-Knowledge Based Authentication in Anonymous Peer-to-Peer Protocols
Most of the current trust models in peer-to-peer (P2P) systems are identity based, which means that in order for one peer to trust another, it needs to know the other peer's identity. Hence, there exists an inherent tradeoff between trust and anonymity. To the best of our knowledge, there is currently no P2P protocol that provides complete mutual anonymity as well as authentication and trust management. We propose a zero-knowledge authentication scheme called pseudo trust (PT), where each peer, instead of using its real identity, generates an unforgeable and verifiable pseudonym using a one-way hash function. A novel authentication scheme based on zero-knowledge proof is designed so peers can be authenticated without leaking any sensitive information. With the help of PT, most existing identity-based trust management schemes become applicable in mutual anonymous P2P systems. We analyze the levels of security and anonymity in PT, and evaluate its performance using trace-driven simulations and a prototype implementation. The strengths of pseudo trust include the lack of need for a centralized trusted party or CA, high scalability and security, low traffic and cryptography processing overheads, and man-in-middle attack resistance. We aim for the pseudo trust design to be included in the P2P trust and anonymity context.