1,979 research outputs found
Applying Formal Methods to Networking: Theory, Techniques and Applications
Despite its great importance, modern network infrastructure is remarkable for
the lack of rigor in its engineering. The Internet which began as a research
experiment was never designed to handle the users and applications it hosts
today. The lack of formalization of the Internet architecture meant limited
abstractions and modularity, especially for the control and management planes,
thus requiring for every new need a new protocol built from scratch. This led
to an unwieldy ossified Internet architecture resistant to any attempts at
formal verification, and an Internet culture where expediency and pragmatism
are favored over formal correctness. Fortunately, recent work in the space of
clean slate Internet design---especially, the software defined networking (SDN)
paradigm---offers the Internet community another chance to develop the right
kind of architecture and abstractions. This has also led to a great resurgence
in interest of applying formal methods to specification, verification, and
synthesis of networking protocols and applications. In this paper, we present a
self-contained tutorial of the formidable amount of work that has been done in
formal methods, and present a survey of its applications to networking.Comment: 30 pages, submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial
A coordination protocol for user-customisable cloud policy monitoring
Cloud computing will see a increasing demand for end-user customisation and personalisation of multi-tenant cloud service offerings. Combined with an identified need to address QoS and governance aspects in cloud computing, a need to provide user-customised QoS and governance policy management and monitoring as part of an SLA management infrastructure for clouds arises. We propose a user-customisable policy definition solution that can be enforced in multi-tenant cloud offerings through an automated instrumentation and monitoring technique. We in particular allow service processes that are run by cloud and SaaS providers to be made policy-aware in a transparent way
XTP for the NASA space station
The NASA Space Station is a truly international effort; therefore, its communications systems must conform to established international standards. Thus, NASA is requiring that each network-interface unit implement a full suite of ISO protocols. However, NASA is understandably concerned that a full ISO stack will not deliver performance consistent with the real-time demands of Space Station control systems. Therefore, as a research project, the suitability of the Xpress transfer protocol (XTP) is investigated along side a full ISO stack. The initial plans for implementing XTP and comparing its performance to ISO TP4 are described
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Using formal methods to support testing
Formal methods and testing are two important approaches that assist in the development of high quality software. While traditionally these approaches have been seen as rivals, in recent
years a new consensus has developed in which they are seen as complementary. This article reviews the state of the art regarding ways in which the presence of a formal specification can be used to assist testing
Tactical communication systems based on civil standards: Modeling in the MiXiM framework
In this paper, new work is presented belonging to an ongoing study, which
evaluates civil communication standards as potential candidates for the future
military Wide Band Waveforms (WBWFs). After an evaluation process of possible
candidates presented in [2], the selection process in [1] showed that the IEEE
802.11n OFDM could be a possible military WBWF candidate, but it should be
further investigated first in order to enhance or even replace critical
modules. According to this, some critical modules of the physical layer has
been further analyzed in [3] regarding the susceptibility of the OFDM signal
under jammer influences. However, the critical modules of the MAC layer (e.g.,
probabilistic medium access CSMA/CA) have not been analysed. In fact, it was
only suggested in [2] to replace this medium access by the better suited
Unified Slot Allocation Protocol - Multiple Access (USAP-MA) [4]. In this
regard, the present contribution describes the design paradigms of the new MAC
layer and explains how the proposed WBWF candidate has been modelled within the
MiXiM Framework of the OMNeT++ simulator.Comment: Published in: A. F\"orster, C. Sommer, T. Steinbach, M. W\"ahlisch
(Eds.), Proc. of 1st OMNeT++ Community Summit, Hamburg, Germany, September 2,
2014, arXiv:1409.0093, 201
Using genetic algorithms to generate test sequences for complex timed systems
The generation of test data for state based specifications is a computationally expensive process. This problem is magnified if we consider that time con- straints have to be taken into account to govern the transitions of the studied system. The main goal of this paper is to introduce a complete methodology, sup- ported by tools, that addresses this issue by represent- ing the test data generation problem as an optimisa- tion problem. We use heuristics to generate test cases. In order to assess the suitability of our approach we consider two different case studies: a communication protocol and the scientific application BIPS3D. We give details concerning how the test case generation problem can be presented as a search problem and automated. Genetic algorithms (GAs) and random search are used to generate test data and evaluate the approach. GAs outperform random search and seem to scale well as the problem size increases. It is worth to mention that we use a very simple fitness function that can be eas- ily adapted to be used with other evolutionary search techniques
ENSURING SPECIFICATION COMPLIANCE, ROBUSTNESS, AND SECURITY OF WIRELESS NETWORK PROTOCOLS
Several newly emerged wireless technologies (e.g., Internet-of-Things, Bluetooth, NFC)âextensively backed by the tech industryâare being widely adopted and have resulted in a proliferation of diverse smart appliances and gadgets (e.g., smart thermostat, wearables, smartphones), which has ensuingly shaped our modern digital life. These technologies include several communication protocols that usually have stringent requirements stated in their specifications. Failing to comply with such requirements can result in incorrect behaviors, interoperability issues, or even security vulnerabilities. Moreover, lack of robustness of the protocol implementation to malicious attacksâexploiting subtle vulnerabilities in the implementationâmounted by the compromised nodes in an adversarial environment can limit the practical utility of the implementation by impairing the performance of the protocol and can even have detrimental effects on the availability of the network. Even having a compliant and robust implementation alone may not suffice in many cases because these technologies often expose new attack surfaces as well as new propagation vectors, which can be exploited by unprecedented malware and can quickly lead to an epidemic
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