On the tailoring of CAST-32A certification guidance to real COTS multicore architectures

The use of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) multicores in real-time industry is on the rise due to multicores' potential performance increase and energy reduction. Yet, the unpredictable impact on timing of contention in shared hardware resources challenges certification. Furthermore, most safety certification standards target single-core architectures and do not provide explicit guidance for multicore processors. Recently, however, CAST-32A has been presented providing guidance for software planning, development and verification in multicores. In this paper, from a theoretical level, we provide a detailed review of CAST-32A objectives and the difficulty of reaching them under current COTS multicore design trends; at experimental level, we assess the difficulties of the application of CAST-32A to a real multicore processor, the NXP P4080.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) under grant TIN2015-65316-P and the HiPEAC Network of Excellence. Jaume Abella has been partially supported by the MINECO under Ramon y Cajal grant RYC-2013-14717.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

BEAT: An Open-Source Web-Based Open-Science Platform

With the increased interest in computational sciences, machine learning (ML), pattern recognition (PR) and big data, governmental agencies, academia and manufacturers are overwhelmed by the constant influx of new algorithms and techniques promising improved performance, generalization and robustness. Sadly, result reproducibility is often an overlooked feature accompanying original research publications, competitions and benchmark evaluations. The main reasons behind such a gap arise from natural complications in research and development in this area: the distribution of data may be a sensitive issue; software frameworks are difficult to install and maintain; Test protocols may involve a potentially large set of intricate steps which are difficult to handle. Given the raising complexity of research challenges and the constant increase in data volume, the conditions for achieving reproducible research in the domain are also increasingly difficult to meet. To bridge this gap, we built an open platform for research in computational sciences related to pattern recognition and machine learning, to help on the development, reproducibility and certification of results obtained in the field. By making use of such a system, academic, governmental or industrial organizations enable users to easily and socially develop processing toolchains, re-use data, algorithms, workflows and compare results from distinct algorithms and/or parameterizations with minimal effort. This article presents such a platform and discusses some of its key features, uses and limitations. We overview a currently operational prototype and provide design insights.Comment: References to papers published on the platform incorporate

Taming the cloud: Safety, certification and compliance for software services - Keynote at the Workshop on Engineering Service-Oriented Applications (WESOA) 2011

The maturity of IT processes, such as software development, can be and is often certified. Current trends in the IT industry suggest that software systems in the future will be very different from their counterparts today, with an increasing adoption of the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) design pattern and the deployment of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) on Cloud infrastructures. In this talk we discuss some issues surrounding engineering Software Services for Cloud infrastructures and highlight the need for enhanced control, service-level agreement and compliance mechanisms for Software Services. Cloud Infrastructures and Service Mash-ups

High-Integrity Performance Monitoring Units in Automotive Chips for Reliable Timing V&V

As software continues to control more system-critical functions in cars, its timing is becoming an integral element in functional safety. Timing validation and verification (V&V) assesses softwares end-to-end timing measurements against given budgets. The advent of multicore processors with massive resource sharing reduces the significance of end-to-end execution times for timing V&V and requires reasoning on (worst-case) access delays on contention-prone hardware resources. While Performance Monitoring Units (PMU) support this finer-grained reasoning, their design has never been a prime consideration in high-performance processors - where automotive-chips PMU implementations descend from - since PMU does not directly affect performance or reliability. To meet PMUs instrumental importance for timing V&V, we advocate for PMUs in automotive chips that explicitly track activities related to worst-case (rather than average) softwares behavior, are recognized as an ISO-26262 mandatory high-integrity hardware service, and are accompanied with detailed documentation that enables their effective use to derive reliable timing estimatesThis work has also been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) under grant TIN2015-65316-P and the HiPEAC Network of Excellence. Jaume Abella has been partially supported by the MINECO under Ramon y Cajal postdoctoral fellowship number RYC-2013-14717. Enrico Mezzet has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under Juan de la Cierva-Incorporación postdoctoral fellowship number IJCI-2016- 27396.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

On Using Blockchains for Safety-Critical Systems

Innovation in the world of today is mainly driven by software. Companies need to continuously rejuvenate their product portfolios with new features to stay ahead of their competitors. For example, recent trends explore the application of blockchains to domains other than finance. This paper analyzes the state-of-the-art for safety-critical systems as found in modern vehicles like self-driving cars, smart energy systems, and home automation focusing on specific challenges where key ideas behind blockchains might be applicable. Next, potential benefits unlocked by applying such ideas are presented and discussed for the respective usage scenario. Finally, a research agenda is outlined to summarize remaining challenges for successfully applying blockchains to safety-critical cyber-physical systems

Secure Cloud-Edge Deployments, with Trust

Assessing the security level of IoT applications to be deployed to heterogeneous Cloud-Edge infrastructures operated by different providers is a non-trivial task. In this article, we present a methodology that permits to express security requirements for IoT applications, as well as infrastructure security capabilities, in a simple and declarative manner, and to automatically obtain an explainable assessment of the security level of the possible application deployments. The methodology also considers the impact of trust relations among different stakeholders using or managing Cloud-Edge infrastructures. A lifelike example is used to showcase the prototyped implementation of the methodology

Dynamic Trust Federation in Grids

Grids are becoming economically viable and productive tools. Grids provide a way of utilizing a vast array of linked resources such as computing systems, databases and services online within Virtual Organizations (VO). However, today’s Grid architectures are not capable of supporting dynamic, agile federation across multiple administrative domains and the main barrier, which hinders dynamic federation over short time scales is security. Federating security and trust is one of the most significant architectural issues in Grids. Existing relevant standards and specifications can be used to federate security services, but do not directly address the dynamic extension of business trust relationships into the digital domain. In this paper we describe an experiment in which we highlight those challenging architectural issues and we will further describe how the approach that combines dynamic trust federation and dynamic authorization mechanism can address dynamic security trust federation in Grids. The experiment made with the prototype described in this paper is used in the NextGRID project for the definition of requirements for next generation Grid architectures adapted to business application need