53,032 research outputs found
Overcoming Language Dichotomies: Toward Effective Program Comprehension for Mobile App Development
Mobile devices and platforms have become an established target for modern
software developers due to performant hardware and a large and growing user
base numbering in the billions. Despite their popularity, the software
development process for mobile apps comes with a set of unique, domain-specific
challenges rooted in program comprehension. Many of these challenges stem from
developer difficulties in reasoning about different representations of a
program, a phenomenon we define as a "language dichotomy". In this paper, we
reflect upon the various language dichotomies that contribute to open problems
in program comprehension and development for mobile apps. Furthermore, to help
guide the research community towards effective solutions for these problems, we
provide a roadmap of directions for future work.Comment: Invited Keynote Paper for the 26th IEEE/ACM International Conference
on Program Comprehension (ICPC'18
XRound : A reversible template language and its application in model-based security analysis
Successful analysis of the models used in Model-Driven Development requires the ability to synthesise the results of analysis and automatically integrate these results with the models themselves. This paper presents a reversible template language called XRound which supports round-trip transformations between models and the logic used to encode system properties. A template processor that supports the language is described, and the use of the template language is illustrated by its application in an analysis workbench, designed to support analysis of security properties of UML and MOF-based models. As a result of using reversible templates, it is possible to seamlessly and automatically integrate the results of a security analysis with a model. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved
AMP: A Science-driven Web-based Application for the TeraGrid
The Asteroseismic Modeling Portal (AMP) provides a web-based interface for
astronomers to run and view simulations that derive the properties of Sun-like
stars from observations of their pulsation frequencies. In this paper, we
describe the architecture and implementation of AMP, highlighting the
lightweight design principles and tools used to produce a functional
fully-custom web-based science application in less than a year. Targeted as a
TeraGrid science gateway, AMP's architecture and implementation are intended to
simplify its orchestration of TeraGrid computational resources. AMP's web-based
interface was developed as a traditional standalone database-backed web
application using the Python-based Django web development framework, allowing
us to leverage the Django framework's capabilities while cleanly separating the
user interface development from the grid interface development. We have found
this combination of tools flexible and effective for rapid gateway development
and deployment.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, in Proceedings of the 5th Grid Computing
Environments Worksho
Architecture and Information Requirements to Assess and Predict Flight Safety Risks During Highly Autonomous Urban Flight Operations
As aviation adopts new and increasingly complex operational paradigms, vehicle types, and technologies to broaden airspace capability and efficiency, maintaining a safe system will require recognition and timely mitigation of new safety issues as they emerge and before significant consequences occur. A shift toward a more predictive risk mitigation capability becomes critical to meet this challenge. In-time safety assurance comprises monitoring, assessment, and mitigation functions that proactively reduce risk in complex operational environments where the interplay of hazards may not be known (and therefore not accounted for) during design. These functions can also help to understand and predict emergent effects caused by the increased use of automation or autonomous functions that may exhibit unexpected non-deterministic behaviors. The envisioned monitoring and assessment functions can look for precursors, anomalies, and trends (PATs) by applying model-based and data-driven methods. Outputs would then drive downstream mitigation(s) if needed to reduce risk. These mitigations may be accomplished using traditional design revision processes or via operational (and sometimes automated) mechanisms. The latter refers to the in-time aspect of the system concept. This report comprises architecture and information requirements and considerations toward enabling such a capability within the domain of low altitude highly autonomous urban flight operations. This domain may span, for example, public-use surveillance missions flown by small unmanned aircraft (e.g., infrastructure inspection, facility management, emergency response, law enforcement, and/or security) to transportation missions flown by larger aircraft that may carry passengers or deliver products. Caveat: Any stated requirements in this report should be considered initial requirements that are intended to drive research and development (R&D). These initial requirements are likely to evolve based on R&D findings, refinement of operational concepts, industry advances, and new industry or regulatory policies or standards related to safety assurance
Towards Smart Hybrid Fuzzing for Smart Contracts
Smart contracts are Turing-complete programs that are executed across a
blockchain network. Unlike traditional programs, once deployed they cannot be
modified. As smart contracts become more popular and carry more value, they
become more of an interesting target for attackers. In recent years, smart
contracts suffered major exploits, costing millions of dollars, due to
programming errors. As a result, a variety of tools for detecting bugs has been
proposed. However, majority of these tools often yield many false positives due
to over-approximation or poor code coverage due to complex path constraints.
Fuzzing or fuzz testing is a popular and effective software testing technique.
However, traditional fuzzers tend to be more effective towards finding shallow
bugs and less effective in finding bugs that lie deeper in the execution. In
this work, we present CONFUZZIUS, a hybrid fuzzer that combines evolutionary
fuzzing with constraint solving in order to execute more code and find more
bugs in smart contracts. Evolutionary fuzzing is used to exercise shallow parts
of a smart contract, while constraint solving is used to generate inputs which
satisfy complex conditions that prevent the evolutionary fuzzing from exploring
deeper paths. Moreover, we use data dependency analysis to efficiently generate
sequences of transactions, that create specific contract states in which bugs
may be hidden. We evaluate the effectiveness of our fuzzing strategy, by
comparing CONFUZZIUS with state-of-the-art symbolic execution tools and
fuzzers. Our evaluation shows that our hybrid fuzzing approach produces
significantly better results than state-of-the-art symbolic execution tools and
fuzzers
Machine-Readable Privacy Certificates for Services
Privacy-aware processing of personal data on the web of services requires
managing a number of issues arising both from the technical and the legal
domain. Several approaches have been proposed to matching privacy requirements
(on the clients side) and privacy guarantees (on the service provider side).
Still, the assurance of effective data protection (when possible) relies on
substantial human effort and exposes organizations to significant
(non-)compliance risks. In this paper we put forward the idea that a privacy
certification scheme producing and managing machine-readable artifacts in the
form of privacy certificates can play an important role towards the solution of
this problem. Digital privacy certificates represent the reasons why a privacy
property holds for a service and describe the privacy measures supporting it.
Also, privacy certificates can be used to automatically select services whose
certificates match the client policies (privacy requirements).
Our proposal relies on an evolution of the conceptual model developed in the
Assert4Soa project and on a certificate format specifically tailored to
represent privacy properties. To validate our approach, we present a worked-out
instance showing how privacy property Retention-based unlinkability can be
certified for a banking financial service.Comment: 20 pages, 6 figure
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