Supporting Cyber-Physical Systems with Wireless Sensor Networks: An Outlook of Software and Services

Sensing, communication, computation and control technologies are the essential building blocks of a cyber-physical system (CPS). Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are a way to support CPS as they provide fine-grained spatial-temporal sensing, communication and computation at a low premium of cost and power. In this article, we explore the fundamental concepts guiding the design and implementation of WSNs. We report the latest developments in WSN software and services for meeting existing requirements and newer demands; particularly in the areas of: operating system, simulator and emulator, programming abstraction, virtualization, IP-based communication and security, time and location, and network monitoring and management. We also reflect on the ongoing efforts in providing dependable assurances for WSN-driven CPS. Finally, we report on its applicability with a case-study on smart buildings

CamFlow: Managed Data-sharing for Cloud Services

A model of cloud services is emerging whereby a few trusted providers manage the underlying hardware and communications whereas many companies build on this infrastructure to offer higher level, cloud-hosted PaaS services and/or SaaS applications. From the start, strong isolation between cloud tenants was seen to be of paramount importance, provided first by virtual machines (VM) and later by containers, which share the operating system (OS) kernel. Increasingly it is the case that applications also require facilities to effect isolation and protection of data managed by those applications. They also require flexible data sharing with other applications, often across the traditional cloud-isolation boundaries; for example, when government provides many related services for its citizens on a common platform. Similar considerations apply to the end-users of applications. But in particular, the incorporation of cloud services within `Internet of Things' architectures is driving the requirements for both protection and cross-application data sharing. These concerns relate to the management of data. Traditional access control is application and principal/role specific, applied at policy enforcement points, after which there is no subsequent control over where data flows; a crucial issue once data has left its owner's control by cloud-hosted applications and within cloud-services. Information Flow Control (IFC), in addition, offers system-wide, end-to-end, flow control based on the properties of the data. We discuss the potential of cloud-deployed IFC for enforcing owners' dataflow policy with regard to protection and sharing, as well as safeguarding against malicious or buggy software. In addition, the audit log associated with IFC provides transparency, giving configurable system-wide visibility over data flows. [...]Comment: 14 pages, 8 figure

Safety-related challenges and opportunities for GPUs in the automotive domain

GPUs have been shown to cover the computing performance needs of autonomous driving (AD) systems. However, since the GPUs used for AD build on designs for the mainstream market, they may lack fundamental properties for correct operation under automotive's safety regulations. In this paper, we analyze some of the main challenges in hardware and software design to embrace GPUs as the reference computing solution for AD, with the emphasis in ISO 26262 functional safety requirements.Authors would like to thank Guillem Bernat from Rapita Systems for his technical feedback on this work. The research leading to this work has received funding from the European Re-search Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 772773). This work has also been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under grant TIN2015-65316-P and the HiPEAC Network of Excellence. Jaume Abella has been partially supported by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under Ramon y Cajal postdoctoral fellowship number RYC-2013-14717. Carles Hernández is jointly funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and FEDER funds through grant TIN2014-60404-JIN.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Secure Compilation (Dagstuhl Seminar 18201)

Secure compilation is an emerging field that puts together advances in security, programming languages, verification, systems, and hardware architectures in order to devise secure compilation chains that eliminate many of today\u27s vulnerabilities. Secure compilation aims to protect a source language\u27s abstractions in compiled code, even against low-level attacks. For a concrete example, all modern languages provide a notion of structured control flow and an invoked procedure is expected to return to the right place. However, today\u27s compilation chains (compilers, linkers, loaders, runtime systems, hardware) cannot efficiently enforce this abstraction: linked low-level code can call and return to arbitrary instructions or smash the stack, blatantly violating the high-level abstraction. The emerging secure compilation community aims to address such problems by devising formal security criteria, efficient enforcement mechanisms, and effective proof techniques. This seminar strived to take a broad and inclusive view of secure compilation and to provide a forum for discussion on the topic. The goal was to identify interesting research directions and open challenges by bringing together people working on building secure compilation chains, on developing proof techniques and verification tools, and on designing security mechanisms