Developing a distributed electronic health-record store for India

The DIGHT project is addressing the problem of building a scalable and highly available information store for the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) of the over one billion citizens of India

Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems

This open access two-volume set constitutes the proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems, TACAS 2020, which took place in Dublin, Ireland, in April 2020, and was held as Part of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2020. The total of 60 regular papers presented in these volumes was carefully reviewed and selected from 155 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections as follows: Part I: Program verification; SAT and SMT; Timed and Dynamical Systems; Verifying Concurrent Systems; Probabilistic Systems; Model Checking and Reachability; and Timed and Probabilistic Systems. Part II: Bisimulation; Verification and Efficiency; Logic and Proof; Tools and Case Studies; Games and Automata; and SV-COMP 2020

Review of Open Source Simulators in ICS/IIoT Security Context

In industrial control systems (ICS), simulation has found widespread use during system design and in tuning process control parameters or exploring the effects of new control algorithms. Simulation enables the assessment of performance at scale and allows research to be conducted by those with limited access to real physical infrastructures. However, as ICSs are often no longer isolated from other networks and the internet, hence are subject to security and safety issues, simulation is also required to understand the issues and their solution. To foster transparent, collaborative and cost-effective studies, demonstrations, and solution development, and attract the broadest interest base, simulation is indeed critical and Open Source is a good way to go since simulators in this category are less expensive to access, install, and use, and can be run with general purpose (non-proprietary) computing equipment and setups. Findings This research presents the following key findings: 1. A lot of Open Source simulation tools exist and span applications areas such as communications and sensor networks (C&WSNs), ICS/SCADA, and IIoT. 2. The functional structures and characteristics that appear common in Open Source simulators include: supported licence types, programming languages, operating systems platforms, user interface types, and available documentation and types. 3. Typical research around Open Source simulators is built around modelling, analysis and optimisation of operations in relations to factors such as flexibility, mobility, scalability, and active user support. No single Open Source simulator addresses all conceivable characteristics. While some are strong in specific contexts relative to their development, they are often weak in other purpose-based research capabilities, especially in the context of IoT. 4. Most of the reviewed Open Source tools are not designed to address security contexts. The few that address security such as SCADASim only consider very limited contexts such as testing and evaluating Denial-of-Service (DoS), Man-in-the-middle (Mitm), Eavesdropping, and Spoofing attacks. Recommendations The following key recommendations are presented: 1. Future developments of Open Source simulators (especially for IIoT) should explore the potential for functionalities that can enable the integration of diverse simulators and platforms to achieve an encompassing setup. 2. Developers should explore the capabilities of generic simulators towards achieving architectures with expansible capabilities into multi-class domains, support easier and faster modelling of complex systems, and which can attract varied users and contributors. 3. Functional characteristics such as; ease of use, degree of community acceptance and use, and suitability for industrial applications, should also be considered as selection and development criteria, and to emphasise simulator effectiveness. This can support consistency, credibility, and simulation system relevance within a domain that is continually evolving. 4. Future Open Source simulation projects developments should consider and adopt the more common structural attributes including; Platform Type, Open Source Licence Type, Programming Language, User Interfaces, Documentation, and Communication Types. These should be further complemented by appropriate editorial controls spanning quality coding, revision control and effective project disseminations and management, to boost simulation tool credibility and wide acceptance. 5. The range of publication dates (earliest to latest) for: citations, code commits, and number of contributors associated to Open Source simulator projects can also support the decision for interests and adoption of specific Open Source projects. 6. Research objectives for ICS/IIoT Open Source simulators should also include security performance and optimisation with considerations towards enhancing confidentiality, integrity and availability. 7. Further studies should explore the evaluation of security topics which could be addressed by simulation – more specifically, proposing how this may be achieved and identifying what can't be addressed by simulation. Investigations into simulation frameworks that can allow multi-mode simulations to be configured and operated are also required. Research into Industry 4.0 System-of-Systems (SoS) security evaluations, dependency, and cascading impacts method or analysis is another area of importanc

Supporting the evolution of software

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Circles within spirals, wheels within wheels; Body rotation facilitates critical insights into animal behavioural ecology

How animals behave is fundamental to enhancing their lifetime fitness, so defining how animals move in space and time relates to many ecological questions, including resource selection, activity budgets and animal movement networks. Historically, animal behaviour and movement has been defined by direct observation, however recent advancements in biotelemetry have revolutionised how we now assess behaviour, particularly allowing animals to be monitored when they cannot be seen. Studies now pair ‘convectional’ radio telemetries with motion sensors to facilitate more detailed investigations of animal space-use. Motion sensitive tags (containing e.g., accelerometers and magnetometers) provide precise data on body movements which characterise behaviour, and this has been exemplified in extensive studies using accelerometery data, which has been linked to space-use defined by GPS. Conversely, consideration of body rotation (particularly change in yaw) is virtually absent within the biologging literature, even though various scales of yaw rotation can reveal important patterns in behaviour and movement, with animal heading being a fundamental component characterising space-use. This thesis explores animal body angles, particularly about the yaw axis, for elucidating animal movement ecology. I used five model species (a reptile, a mammal and three birds) to demonstrate the value of assessing body rotation for investigating fine-scale movement-specific behaviours. As part of this, I advanced the ‘dead-reckoning’ method, where fine-scale animal movement between temporally poorly resolved GPS fixes can be deduced using heading vectors and speed. I addressed many issues with this protocol, highlighting errors and potential solutions but was able to show how this approach leads to insights into many difficult-to-study animal behaviours. These ranged from elucidating how and where lions cross supposedly impermeable man-made barriers to examining how penguins react to tidal currents and then navigate their way to their nests far from the sea in colonies enclosed within thick vegetation

mCrash: a framework for the evaluation of mobile devices' trustworthiness properties

Dissertação apresentada à Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade de Coimbra para obtenção do grau de Mestre em "Informatics and Systems", orientada por Mário Alberto Zenha-Rela. Apenas está disponível um resumo da dissertação.Mobile devices, such as Smartphones, are being used virtually by every modern individual. Such devices are expected to work continuously and awlessly for years, despite having been designed without criticality requirements. However, the requirements of mobility, digital identi cation and authentication lead to an increasing dependence of societies on the correct behaviour of these \proxies for the individual". The Windows Mobile 5.0 release has delivered a new set of internal state monitoring services, centralized into the State and Noti cations Broker. This API was designed to be used by context-aware applications, providing a comprehensive monitoring of the internal state and resources of mobile devices. We propose using this service to increase the dependability of mobile applications by showing, through a series of fault-injection campaigns, that this novel API is very e ective for error propagation pro ling and monitoring

Model driven software modernisation

Constant innovation of information technology and ever-changing market requirements relegate more and more existing software to legacy status. Generating software through reusing legacy systems has been a primary solution and software re-engineering has the potential to improve software productivity and quality across the entire software life cycle. The classical re-engineering technology starts at the level of program source code which is the most or only reliable information on a legacy system. The program specification derived from legacy source code will then facilitate the migration of legacy systems in the subsequent forward engineering steps. A recent research trend in re-engineering area carries this idea further and moves into model driven perspective that the specification is presented with models. The thesis focuses on engaging model technology to modernise legacy systems. A unified approach, REMOST (Re-Engineering through MOdel conStruction and Transformation), is proposed in the context of Model Driven Architecture (MDA). The theoretical foundation is the construction of a WSL-based Modelling Language, known as WML, which is an extension of WSL (Wide Spectrum Language). WML is defined to provide a spectrum of models for the system re-engineering, including Common Modelling Language (CML), Architecture Description Language (ADL) and Domain Specific Modelling Language (DSML). 9rtetaWML is designed for model transformation, providing query facilities, action primitives and metrics functions. A set of transformation rules are defined in 9rtetaWML to conduct system abstraction and refactoring. Model transformation for unifying WML and UML is also provided, which can bridge the legacy systems to MDA. The architecture and working flow of the REMOST approach are proposed and a prototype tool environment is developed for testing the approach. A number of case studies are used for experiments with the approach and the prototype tool, which show that the proposed approach is feasible and promising in its domain. Conclusion is drawn based on analysis and further research directions are also discussed

Actor-Oriented Programming for Resource Constrained Multiprocessor Networks on Chip

Multiprocessor Networks on Chip (MPNoCs) are an attractive architecture for integrated circuits as they can benefit from the improved performance of ever smaller transistors but are not severely constrained by the poor performance of global on-chip wires. As the number of processors increases it becomes ever more expensive to provide coherent shared memory but this is a foundational assumption of thread-level parallelism. Threaded models of concurrency cannot efficiently address architectures where shared memory is not coherent or does not exist. In this thesis an extended actor oriented programming model is proposed to enable the design of complex and general purpose software for highly parallel and decentralised multiprocessor architectures. This model requires the encapsulation of an execution context and state into isolated Machines which may only initiate communication with one another via explicitly named channels. An emphasis on message passing and strong isolation of computation encourages application structures that are congruent with the nature of non-shared memory multiprocessors, and the model also avoids creating dependences on specific hardware topologies. A realisation of the model called Machine Java is presented to demonstrate the applicability of the model to a general purpose programming language. Applications designed with this framework are shown to be capable of scaling to large numbers of processors and remain independent of the hardware targets. Through the use of an efficient compilation technique, Machine Java is demonstrated to be portable across several architectures and viable even in the highly constrained context of an FPGA hosted MPNoC

Rule-based Metaprogramming for Smart Spaces

The motivation of this work is goes back to the objective of achieving interoperability in multiparty environments such as ubiquitous systems. Full interoperability in an open environment requires mutually sharing the behavior of the participants, so that the behavioral interoperability becomes as relevant as interoperability of data. This requires analysis or evaluation of behavioral descriptions from untrusted parties in a controlled manner. Furthermore we need to manage the evaluation process based on the content and provenance of the descriptions and other information on which the descriptions operate. This information allows one to choose which behaviour is to be used and which data is to be operated on. To enable this vision we propose to present behavioral descriptions as Answer Set Programming (ASP) rules. In this work we present a method for the evaluation of ASP rules based on metaprogramming: the evaluator for the rules is implemented using ASP rules themselves. To facilitate metaevaluation, we transform rules to a reified format, which enables representing rules as facts, and construct the metaevaluator to work directly on this reified format. Facts corresponding to reified rules and the metaevaluation rules are then treated by native ASP tools. We give a proof that our metaevaluator adheres to the stable model semantics for ASP evaluation. Having rules in the reified format is beneficial as behavioral rules can then be shared and manipulated as any other data. We have implemented a mechanism which maintains the provenance information of data during the rule evaluation along with hooks to allow control over the context of the use of that data. This allows attaching arbitrary metainformation to rules and facts and allows independently creating policies which control on how different data is handled in the ASP solving phase. In addition to the metaevaluation phase, we have implemented syntactical safety analysis of reified rules. These methods enable sharing, analyzing and executing behavioral descriptions in a controlled manner within the same semantic ASP framework, providing one solution for the interoperability problem. The evaluation of ASP rules has two logical phases: grounding and actual solving. We have separated provenance handling and syntactic analysis to the metagrounding phase with the intention that rules and data, which do not match the provenance criteria, are never delivered to the solving phase. To the best of our knowledge, this work presents the first implementation of a metagrounder for ASP programs. According to performance analysis, the metagrounder is not yet competitive with current grounder technology.Tämän opinnäytteen motivaationa on yhteensopivuus ubiikkien järjestelmien kaltaisissa usean käyttäjän ympäristöissä. Täydellinen yhteensopivuus avoimissa ympäristöissä vaatii osapuolten käyttäytymisten kuvausten jakamista käyttäjien kesken. Tällöin käyttäytymisen kuvausten yhteensopivuus muodostuu yhtä tärkeäksi kuin muun tiedon yhteensopivuus. Tästä johtuen on tarpeellista analysoida tai evaluoida hallitusti käyttäytymisten kuvauksia, jotka ovat peräisin mahdollisesti epäluotettavilta tahoilta. Tämän lisäksi evaluointiprosessia täytyy hallinnoida perustuen sekä käyttäytymisten kuvausten että muun käytetyn tiedon sisältöön ja alkuperään. Tämän tiedon avulla valitaan mitä käyttäytymiskuvauksia ja mitä tietoa tullaan käyttämään evaluoinnissa. Tämän vision mahdollistamiseksi tässä työssä ehdotetaan käyttäytymiskuvausten esitettämistä sääntöpohjaisella rajoiteohjelmoinnilla (engl. Answer Set Programming, ASP). Tässä opinnäytteessä kuvataan metaohjelmointipohjainen menetelmä sääntöjen evaluoimiseen, missä itse evaluaattori on toteutettu ASP-säännöillä. Jotta metaevaluaatio olisi mahdollista, säännöt muunnetaan reifioituun muotoon, joka sallii sääntöjen esittämisen faktoina ja metaevaluaattori toteutetaan toimimaan näiden reifioitujen kuvausten kanssa. Faktoina esitetyt reifioidut säännöt ja metaevaluaattorin säännöt evaluoidaan olemassaolevilla ASP-työkaluilla. Työssä esitetään oikeellisuustodistus, jonka perusteella toteutettu metaevaluaattori noudattaa stabiilien mallien semantiikkaa. Sääntöjen esittäminen reifioidussa muodossa on hyödyllistä, sillä tällöin sääntöjä voidaan jakaa ja käsitellä samoin kuin muutakin tietoa. Tässä työssä esitetään lisäksi menetelmä, joka säilyttää sääntöjen käyttämien tietojen alkuperän sääntöjen evaluoinnissa. Tämän ohella esitellään edelliseen laajennus jonka avulla voidaan kontrolloida syötetiedon käyttökonteksti. Tämä mekanismi mahdollistaa mielivaltaisen metainformaation liittämisen sääntöihin sekä muuhun tietoon ja suo erityisesti mahdollisuuden määrittää lisätoimintaperiaatteita sääntöevaluoinnin ohjaamiseen. Nämä menetelmät mahdollistavat käyttäytymissääntöjen turvallisen ja hallitun jakamisen, analysoinnin sekä evaluaation yhdessä semanttisessa viitekehyksessä, tarjoten erään mahdollisen ratkaisun yhteensopivuusongelmaan. Työssä esitetään myös syntaktinen turvallisuusanalyysi reifioiduille säännöille. ASP-sääntöjen evaluaatiossa on kaksi loogista vaihetta: muuttujien instantiointi ja varsinainen ratkaiseminen. Tietojen alkuperän käsittely sekä syntaktinen analyysi on rajattu metatasolle. Näin varmistetaan, että tiedot tai säännöt, jotka eivät ole toimintaperiaatteiden mukaisia, eivät koskaan päädy ratkaisuvaiheeseen. Tässä työssä on esitetty käsittääkseemme ensimmäinen toteutus ASP-sääntöjen instantioinnista metatasolla. Suoritetun vertailun perusteella metatason instantioinnin tehokkuus ei ole vielä kilpailukykyinen nykyisten instantiointitekniikoiden kanssa