A Categorical Approach to Verifying Consistency in Concurrent Systems

A concurrent system involves several executing components. Such a system usually allows to carry out multiple tasks at the same time, which can speed up the computational work of software substantially. The recent research findings demonstrate that process-oriented programming languages provide a suitable means for developing concurrent systems. However, design and implementation are at different levels of abstraction in software development process. It is challenging to incorporate knowledge and experience to control the consistency between these phases in developing concurrent systems. The potential inconsistencies arising would introduce errors to the production of concurrent systems, which would prove fatal to the systems in areas with zero tolerance for failure. To tackle such a challenge, the goal of this research is to propose an innovative categorical framework for designing, implementing and verifying the consistency of communications. This framework is inspired by Hoare's vision of category theory and obtained research results towards validating the vision. In this framework, Communicating Sequential Processes(CSP) and Erasmus are used for design and implementation. In addition, abstract interpretation is employed to extract process communications from implementation. Furthermore, several novel rules to analyze semantics of abstraction of implementation are proposed for Erasmus. Finally, category theory is utilized as an innovative means to model and verify consistency of process communications. The framework is illustrated by using several running examples

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

Secure Remote Attestation for Safety-Critical Embedded and IoT Devices

In recent years, embedded and cyber-physical systems (CPS), under the guise of Internet-of-Things (IoT), have entered many aspects of daily life. Despite many benefits, this develop-ment also greatly expands the so-called attack surface and turns these newly computerizedgadgets into attractive attack targets. One key component in securing IoT devices is malwaredetection, which is typically attained with (secure) remote attestation. Remote attestationis a distinct security service that allows a trusted verifier to verify the internal state of aremote untrusted device. Remote attestation is especially relevant for low/medium-end em-bedded devices that are incapable of protecting themselves against malware infection. Assafety-critical IoT devices become commonplace, it is crucial for remote attestation not tointerfere with the device’s normal operations. In this dissertation, we identify major issues inreconciling remote attestation and safety-critical application needs. We show that existingattestation techniques require devices to perform uninterruptible (atomic) operations duringattestation. Such operations can be time-consuming and thus may be harmful to the device’ssafety-critical functionality. On the other hand, simply relaxing security requirements of re-mote attestation can lead to other vulnerabilities. To resolve this conflict, this dissertationpresents the design, implementation, and evaluation of several mitigation techniques. In par-ticular, we propose two light-weight techniques capable of providing interruptible attestationmodality. In contrast to traditional techniques, our proposed techniques allow interrupts tooccur during attestation while ensuring malware detection via shuffled memory traversals ormemory locking mechanisms. Another type of techniques pursued in this dissertation aimsto minimize the real-time computation overhead during attestation. We propose using peri-odic self-measurements to measure and record the device’s state, resulting in more flexiblescheduling of the attestation process and also in no real-time burden as part of its interactionwith verifier. This technique is particularly suitable for swarm settings with a potentiallylarge number of safety-critical devices. Finally, we develop a remote attestation HYDRAarchitecture, based on a formally verified component, and use it as a building block in ourproposed mitigation techniques. We believe that this architecture may be of independentinterest

C3S2E-2008-2016-FinalPrograms

This document records the final programs for each of the 9 meetings of the C* Conference on Computer Science & Software Engineering, C 3S2E which were organized in various locations on three continents. The papers published during these years are accessible from the digital librariy of ACM(2008-2016

The Business of Modularity and the Modularity of Business

Matthijs Wolters was born on June 4 1972 in Dronten, the Netherlands. He studied Econometrics at the University of Groningen, with a specialization in Operations Research and Statistics. During his study he was involved in a number of research investigations, varying from forecasting the outcome of tennis matches to a viewers inquiry for a popularscientific television program. He graduated in 1996 on a thesis that dealt with the development and testing of algorithms and heuristics for efficient orderpicking in warehouses. Since October 1996 he has been working at the Erasmus University Rotterdam as a Ph.D. candidate on modularity, mass-customization, dynamic networking and ICT. His research was published in several newspapers, books and journals and he presented his work at international conferences. He also supervised a number of graduation students with their master's project. In 1998 he organized an international conference "Electronic Commerce: Crossing Boundaries". Recently, he has started his own company Ludens Research and Consultancy in which he continues his work on customer-oriented organizing and modularity.This thesis deals with the concept of modularity, which is used in many different fields of research and applications. The objective of this dissertation is to investigate how and to what extent business networks can use modularity to become more customer-responsive and flexible. For this purpose, a theoretical framework on modularity has been developed, which focuses on three dimensions of doing business: designing products, business processes and supply chains. The central proposition is that a concurrent, modular design in these three dimensions increases the performance of inter-organizational business networks in general and a mass-customization strategy in particular. This proposition was validated in a number of empirical settings. First, the applicability of a business modeling approach, called Modular Network Design, was validated in the air cargo industry. Second, it was investigated how the Dutch building industry applies modularity in order to mass-customize newly built houses. Third, a survey was held among numerous customizing organizations, dispersed all over the world, which led to more understanding about the relationship between business modularity and organizational performance