Addressing aspect interactions in an industrial setting: experiences, problems and solutions

Aspect oriented programming (AOP) introduces new and powerful modularization constructs. The aspect module is used to encapsulate crosscutting concerns, which otherwise would remain tangled and scattered. The idea of encapsulating crosscutting concerns rapidly expanded to earlier phases in the development cycle, including requirement analysis (aspect oriented requirement engineering, AORE) and design (aspect oriented modeling, AOM). The overall application of aspect orientation concepts is known as aspect oriented software development (AOSD). AOP is not yet a mainstream practice. Particularly AOSD is still in its early stages. This is reflected in the lack of reports of full development cycles using aspect oriented approaches, especially using industrial case studies. Furthermore, the power of aspects comes at the price of new challenges, one of them is that systems built using aspects are more difficult to understand. The crosscutting nature of aspects allows them to alter the behavior of many other modules. As a result, aspects may interact in unintended and unanticipated ways. This problem is known as aspect interactions. In this work we deal with the aspect interaction problem in the context of an industrial domain: slots machines. We perform a complete development cycle of the slot machine software. This is, to the best of our knowledge, the first complete industrial case of study of aspect orientation. Through this experience we discovered the limitations with regard to aspect interactions, of some emblematic aspect oriented approaches for requirement engineering, design and implementation. The contribution of this work is threefold. Firstly, we contribute with the evaluation and extensions to some of AORE and AOM approaches, in order to provide explicit support for aspect interactions in requirement analysis and design phases. We also evaluate the implementation of interactions using a static and a dynamic AOP language, and propose an AspectJ extension that copes with aspect interactions. Secondly, this work is the first report of a complete aspect oriented development cycle of an industrial case study. Thirdly, this work provides a complex case study that presents several business logic crosscutting concerns, which in turn exhibit numerous aspect interactions, that serves as a challenging test bed for upcoming AOSD approaches.Facultad de Informátic

EFFICIENT RUNTIME SECURITY SYSTEM FOR DECENTRALISED DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS

Distributed systems can be defined as systems that are scattered over geographical distances and provide different activities through communication, processing, data transfer and so on. Thus, increasing the cooperation, efficiency, and reliability to deal with users and data resources jointly. For this reason, distributed systems have been shown to be a promising infrastructure for most applications in the digital world. Despite their advantages, keeping these systems secure, is a complex task because of the unconventional nature of distributed systems which can produce many security problems like phishing, denial of services or eavesdropping. Therefore, adopting security and privacy policies in distributed systems will increase the trustworthiness between the users and these systems. However, adding or updating security is considered one of the most challenging concerns and this relies on various security vulnerabilities which existing in distributed systems. The most significant one is inserting or modifying a new security concern or even removing it according to the security status which may appear at runtime. Moreover, these problems will be exacerbated when the system adopts the multi-hop concept as a way to deal with transmitting and processing information. This can pose many significant security challenges especially if dealing with decentralized distributed systems and the security must be furnished as end-to-end. Unfortunately, existing solutions are insufficient to deal with these problems like CORBA which is considered a one-to-one relationship only, or DSAW which deals with end-to-end security but without taking into account the possibility of changing information sensitivity during runtime. This thesis provides a proposed mechanism for enforcing security policies and dealing with distributed systems’ security weakness in term of the software perspective. The proposed solution utilised Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP), to address security concerns during compilation and running time. The proposed solution is based on a decentralized distributed system that adopts the multi-hop concept to deal with different requested tasks. The proposed system focused on how to achieve high accuracy, data integrity and high efficiency of the distributed system in real time. This is done through modularising the most efficient security solutions, Access Control and Cryptography, by using Aspect-Oriented Programming language. The experiments’ results show the proposed solution overcomes the shortage of the existing solutions by fully integrating with the decentralized distributed system to achieve dynamic, high cooperation, high performance and end-to-end holistic security

Memoria 2011

-Autoridades. -Comisiones asesoras honorarias. -Plan general de acciones. -Estructura. -Formación de Recursos Humanos. -Centros de investigación. -Programa de modernización tecnológica. -Promoción y difusión científica. -Ejecución presupuestaria.Digitalizado en SEDICI-CIC Digita