1199528
Specifying Dynamic Security Properties of Web Service Based Systems
The security characteristics of web service based systems depend on those of the individual web services (WS) involved and the way in which they are related to each other. In principle, the security characteristics of WS or systems can be expressed in security properties that are published and available to external parties. Only by knowing the security properties of the individual WS another WS can invoke it (if it satisfies certain security requirements and capabilities) and the overall system?s security properties can be analysed and deduced. In our earlier work, we have developed the security characterisation language, SCL, to specify the static security properties of software components and systems. In this paper, we use SCL for describing security properties of WS and further enhance this language with the capability of specifying the dynamic security characteristics. The extended version of SCL (E-SCL) incorporates such features as time, time intervals, time sequence, probability, runtime conditions, and alternative security properties. Furthermore, we have developed the WS security ontology and applied it together with E-SCL to publish the dynamic security properties of WS using OWL-S and analyse them dynamically. Our approach is illustrated with an example email system.
1745958
Industrial Perspective on the Usefulness of Design Rationale for Software Maintenance: A Survey
Software maintenance is widely known as a problematic area that may consume up to 80% of a software project's resources. It has been claimed that providing an effective mechanism to access design rationale (DR) has great potential to improve software maintenance processes. However, we postulate that the first step towards exploring the potential of DR for improving software maintenance should be to gain a better understanding of what DR means to practitioners, how valuable they consider DR to be and how they use DR. To determine the perceived usefulness of DR, we surveyed a large number of software designers. This exploratory study has discovered that practitioners recognize the importance of DR to understand existing designs and frequently use it to reason about proposed modifications. The results of this study establish that DR is perceived by practitioners to be useful and the efforts required to capture DR for the purpose of maintenance are worthwhile. The findings allow us to identify areas of further research on DR support that have the potential to improve the maintenance process
17910560
Providing configuration management support in software engineering environments
Software configuration management (CM) is a key element of any software development project. A software engineering environment should not only provide support for software products and software processes in general, but also pay attention to high-level software engineering concepts like CM. In this paper, we present an overview of our approach to software engineering environments and demonstrate how CM can be achieved in such environments with minimal effort by codifying a CM model. Issues addressed include the structures and consistency of CM components and their relationships, the definition and activation of CM operations, and the definition of presentation views that facilitate CM activities.
629310
Semantic and Usage Packaging for Software Components
Current models for software components have made component-based software engineering practical. However, these models are limited in the sense that their support for the specification of software components primarily deals with syntactic issues. To facilitate interoperability and proper use of software components, more comprehensive specification of these components is required. In this paper, we present an approach to software component packaging aimed at comprehensive component specification, especially its support for semantic and usage specification.
3251598
TRAM: a tool for requirements and architecture management
Management of system requirements and system architectures is part of any software engineering project. But it is usually very tedious and error prone. In particular, managing the traceability between system requirements and system architectures is critical but difficult. The article introduces a tool, TRAM, for managing system requirements, system architectures and more importantly the traceability between them. Its primary design objective is "being practical" and ready for practitioners to use without much overhead. The issues discussed in the paper include an information model that underlies the capture of requirements, architectures and their traceability, a set of document templates implementing the information model, and the support tool.
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.
14694684
A mutual anonymous peer-to-peer protocol design
Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing has become a popular application model because of its easy resource sharing pattern and powerful query search scheme. However, decentralized P2P architecture is scarcely seen to deploy the anonymity on its peers. In this paper, we propose a mutual anonymity protocol, called Secret-sharing-based Mutual Anonymity Protocol (SSMP), for decentralized P2P systems. SSMP employs Shamirs' secret sharing scheme to allow peers to issue queries and responders to deliver requested files anonymously. Compared with previous designs, SSMP achieves mutual anonymity in P2P systems with a high degree of anonymity and a low cryptography processing overhead. We evaluate SSMP by comprehensive simulations.
8876000
Discovery of Multiple-Level Association Rules from Large Databases
Previous studies on mining association rules find rules at single concept level, however, mining association rules at multiple concept levels may lead to the discovery of more specific and concrete knowledge from data. In this study, a top-down progressive deepening method is developed for mining multiplelevel association rules from large transaction databases by extension of some existing association rule mining techniques. A group of variant algorithms are proposed based on the ways of sharing intermediate results, with the relative performance tested on different kinds of data. Relaxation of the rule conditions for finding “level-crossing” association rules is also discussed in the paper.
27160507
A Random Walk Based Anonymous Peer-to-Peer Protocol Design
Anonymity has been one of the most challenging issues in Ad Hoc environment such as P2P systems. In this paper, we propose an anonymous protocol called Random Walk based Anonymous Protocol (RWAP), in decentralized P2P systems. We evaluate RWAP by comprehensive trace driven simulations. Results show that RWAP significantly reduces traffic cost and encryption overhead compared with existing approaches.
2286606
Scene-Level Analysis for Tennis Sports Video using Weighted Linear Combination of Visual Cues
We present a scene-level analysis system that takes TV broadcasted tennis footage as input and produces a behavior analysis of the moving-players in the scene. To achieve this functionality, our algorithm relies on two modular blocks. The first one detects and tracks a number of key objects in the image domain, like moving-players and the playing-field. Afterwards, a camera-calibration algorithm is applied that uses the lines of the court as a reference and transforms image coordinates to physical positions to compute the camera parameters. The second block firstly models several important events of a tennis game, such as service and net-approach, based on four real-world visual features provided by the first block. This paper proposes a new improved model, since it weights the importance of each visual cue to different events, rather than providing a simple combination of these four visual cues as was done in previous work. Based on the new model, we can accurately determine what kind of event the current input frame belongs to. Furthermore, we detect the start time and end time of each event using a simple but efficient temporal filter. Our proposed system is capable of classifying each tennis play into three semantic categories, which are popular and familiar to most viewers. This paper presents details of the system, together with results on a number of tennis video sequences.
43532686
AIM: Approximate Intelligent Matching for Time Series Data
Time-series data mining presents many challenges due to the intrinsic large scale and high dimensionality of the data sets. Subsequence similarity matching has been an active research area driven by the need to analyse large data sets in the financial, biomedical and scientific databases. In this paper, we investigate an intelligent subsequence similarity matching of time series queries based on efficient graph traversal. We introduce a new problem, the approximate partial matching of a query sequence in a time series database. Our system can address such queries with high specificity and minimal time and space overhead. The performance bottleneck of the current methods were analysed and we show our method can improve the performance of the time series queries significantly. It is general and flexible enough to find the best approximate match query without specifying a tolerance Ɛ parameter.