Research in computer science

Several short summaries of the work performed during this reporting period are presented. Topics discussed in this document include: (1) resilient seeded errors via simple techniques; (2) knowledge representation for engineering design; (3) analysis of faults in a multiversion software experiment; (4) implementation of parallel programming environment; (5) symbolic execution of concurrent programs; (6) two computer graphics systems for visualization of pressure distribution and convective density particles; (7) design of a source code management system; (8) vectorizing incomplete conjugate gradient on the Cyber 203/205; (9) extensions of domain testing theory and; (10) performance analyzer for the pisces system

Source-level runtime validation through interval temporal logic

The high degree of software complexity achievable through current software development practices makes software more prone to failure. A number of work and work practices has evolved in order to reduce risks related to software correctness and reliability. One of which is validation, which monitors the system execution at runtime and verifies that the system states entered are valid according to the behavioural specification. This paper describes a framework providing an assertion like validation environment for integrating software properties specified in interval temporal logic. The framework consists in three parts. The first part provides a mechanism for converting the human readable assertion to a symbolic automata, which is then used by the second part of the framework that performs the validation.peer-reviewe

A log analysis based intrusion detection system for the creation of a specification based intrusion prevention system

We propose a novel Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) which would base its knowledge and operation on a higher level of abstraction than the processing of the contents of the network packets audit data themselves which is the source of data on which most current and proposed Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) base themselves on. We focus on what is actually being asked of the system, and use that understanding together with research on prediction based systems to build a specification based Intrusion Prevention System based on the patterns extracted from higher level application or operating system logs.peer-reviewe

An approach to software maintenance support using a syntactic source code analyser data base : this thesis is presented in a partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Computer Science at Massey University

In this thesis, the development of a software maintenance tool called a syntactic source code analyser (SSCA) is summarised. An SSCA supports other maintenance tools which interact with source code by creating a data base of source information which has links to a formatted version of program source code. The particular SSCA presented handles programs written in a version of COBOL. Before developing a SSCA system, aspects of software maintenance need to be considered. Hence, the scope, definitions and problems of maintenance activities are briefly reviewed and maintenance support through environments, software metrics, and specific tools and techniques examined. A complete maintenance support environment for an application is found to overlap considerably with the application documentation system and shares some tools with development environments. Program source code is also identified as the fundamental documentation of an application and interaction with this source code is a requirement of many maintenance support tools