FRIENDS - A flexible architecture for implementing fault tolerant and secure distributed applications

FRIENDS is a software-based architecture for implementing fault-tolerant and, to some extent, secure applications. This architecture is composed of sub-systems and libraries of metaobjects. Transparency and separation of concerns is provided not only to the application programmer but also to the programmers implementing metaobjects for fault tolerance, secure communication and distribution. Common services required for implementing metaobjects are provided by the sub-systems. Metaobjects are implemented using object-oriented techniques and can be reused and customised according to the application needs, the operational environment and its related fault assumptions. Flexibility is increased by a recursive use of metaobjects. Examples and experiments are also described

Implementing fault tolerant applications using reflective object-oriented programming

Abstract: Shows how reflection and object-oriented programming can be used to ease the implementation of classical fault tolerance mechanisms in distributed applications. When the underlying runtime system does not provide fault tolerance transparently, classical approaches to implementing fault tolerance mechanisms often imply mixing functional programming with non-functional programming (e.g. error processing mechanisms). The use of reflection improves the transparency of fault tolerance mechanisms to the programmer and more generally provides a clearer separation between functional and non-functional programming. The implementations of some classical replication techniques using a reflective approach are presented in detail and illustrated by several examples, which have been prototyped on a network of Unix workstations. Lessons learnt from our experiments are drawn and future work is discussed

Biggest Failures in Security (Dagstuhl Seminar 19451)

In the present era of ubiquitous digitalization, security is a concern for everyone. Despite enormous efforts, securing IT systems still remains an open challenge for community and industry. One of the main reasons is that the variety and complexity of IT systems keeps increasing, making it practically impossible for security experts to grasp the full system. A further problem is that security has become an interdisciplinary challenge. While interdisciplinary research does exist already, it is mostly restricted to collaborations between two individual disciplines and has been rather bottom-up by focusing on very specific problems. The idea of the Dagstuhl Seminar was to go one step back and to follow a comprehensive top-down approach instead. The goal was to identify the "biggest failures" in security and to get a comprehensive understanding on their overall impact on security. To this end, the Dagstuhl Seminar was roughly divided into two parts. First, experienced experts from different disciplines gave overview talks on the main problems of their field. Based on these, overlapping topics but also common research interests among the participants have been identified. Afterwards, individual working groups have been formed to work on the identified questions

Software reliability and dependability: a roadmap

Shifting the focus from software reliability to user-centred measures of dependability in complete software-based systems. Influencing design practice to facilitate dependability assessment. Propagating awareness of dependability issues and the use of existing, useful methods. Injecting some rigour in the use of process-related evidence for dependability assessment. Better understanding issues of diversity and variation as drivers of dependability. Bev Littlewood is founder-Director of the Centre for Software Reliability, and Professor of Software Engineering at City University, London. Prof Littlewood has worked for many years on problems associated with the modelling and evaluation of the dependability of software-based systems; he has published many papers in international journals and conference proceedings and has edited several books. Much of this work has been carried out in collaborative projects, including the successful EC-funded projects SHIP, PDCS, PDCS2, DeVa. He has been employed as a consultant t