Fault tolerance via diversity for off-the-shelf products: A study with SQL database servers

If an off-the-shelf software product exhibits poor dependability due to design faults, then software fault tolerance is often the only way available to users and system integrators to alleviate the problem. Thanks to low acquisition costs, even using multiple versions of software in a parallel architecture, which is a scheme formerly reserved for few and highly critical applications, may become viable for many applications. We have studied the potential dependability gains from these solutions for off-the-shelf database servers. We based the study on the bug reports available for four off-the-shelf SQL servers plus later releases of two of them. We found that many of these faults cause systematic noncrash failures, which is a category ignored by most studies and standard implementations of fault tolerance for databases. Our observations suggest that diverse redundancy would be effective for tolerating design faults in this category of products. Only in very few cases would demands that triggered a bug in one server cause failures in another one, and there were no coincident failures in more than two of the servers. Use of different releases of the same product would also tolerate a significant fraction of the faults. We report our results and discuss their implications, the architectural options available for exploiting them, and the difficulties that they may present

Fault diversity among off-the-shelf SQL database servers

Fault tolerance is often the only viable way of obtaining the required system dependability from systems built out of "off-the-shelf" (OTS) products. We have studied a sample of bug reports from four off-the-shelf SQL servers so as to estimate the possible advantages of software fault tolerance - in the form of modular redundancy with diversity - in complex off-the-shelf software. We checked whether these bugs would cause coincident failures in more than one of the servers. We found that very few bugs affected two of the four servers, and none caused failures in more than two. We also found that only four of these bugs would cause identical, undetectable failures in two servers. Therefore, a fault-tolerant server, built with diverse off-the-shelf servers, seems to have a good chance of delivering improvements in availability and failure rates compared with the individual off-the-shelf servers or their replicated, nondiverse configurations

The effect of vacuum polarisation on muon-proton scattering at small energies and angles

We give a compact expression for the unpolarised differential cross section for muon-proton scattering in the one photon exchange approximation. The effect of adding the vacuum polarisation amplitude to the no-spin-flip amplitude for one photon exchange is calculated at small energies and scattering angles and is found to be negligible for present experiments.Comment: 6 pages, one figur

Diversity, Safety and Security in Embedded Systems: modelling adversary effort and supply chain risks

We present quantitative considerations for the design of redundancy and diversity in embedded systems with security requirements. The potential for malicious activity against these systems have complicated requirements and design choices. New design trade-offs have arisen besides those already familiar in this area: for instance, adding redundancy may increase the attack surface of a system and thus increase overall risk. Our case study concerns protecting redundant communications between a control system and its controlled physical system. We study the effects of using: (i) different encryption keys on replicated channels, and (ii) diverse encryption schemes and implementations. We consider two attack scenarios, with adversaries having access to (i) ways of reducing the search space in attacks using random searches for keys; or (ii) hidden major flaws in some crypto algorithm or implementation. Trade-offs between the requirements of integrity and confidentiality are found, but not in all cases. Simple models give useful design insights. In this system, we find that key diversity improves integrity without impairing confidentiality – no trade-offs arise between the two – and it can substantially increase adversary effort, but it will not remedy substantial weaknesses of the crypto system. Implementation diversity does involve design trade-offs between integrity and confidentiality, which we analyse, but turns out to be generally desirable for highly critical applications of the control system considered

The effect of tax structure in economic growth

The main goal of this paper is to analyse the effect of the tax structure in the economic growth of Kosovo in the period 2007-2015. The study intends to evaluate the impact of specific types of taxes on economic growth. The methodology is based on comparative analysis of data using primary and secondary sources. Through the econometric model and linear regression analysis, the research hypotheses have been tested with STATA application/software to calculate the impact of tax structure in economic growth. The econometric model includes several independent variables (types of taxes), and the dependent variable GDP. Based on data obtained through the log-log model, the results show the impact of special taxes such as Pt, It, VAT, Wt, Ibt, Tdr.., Ct on GDP. The results show that most of the taxes have a positive impact on GDP growth; it is also shown that not all taxes have the same impact on economic growth. In the econometric analysis the coefficient of R2=0,999 reflects the high degree of determination with 99.9% forecasting accuracy.peer-reviewe

Diversity for Safety and Security in Embedded Systems

We present ongoing work about how security and safety properties in embedded systems are affected by redundancy and diversity. The need to consider security requirements in the presence of malicious action creates additional design trade-offs besides those familiar in the design of safety critical and highly reliable systems. We outline the motivation for this work, an industrial case study, and the research direction we have taken

The isospin symmetry breaking effects in Ke4K_{e4} decays

The Fermi-Watson theorem is generalized to the case of two coupled channels with different masses and applied to final state interaction in $K_{e4}$ decays. The impact of considered effect on the phase of the $\pi\pi$ scattering is estimated and shown that it can be crucial for scattering lengths extraction from experimental data on $K_{e4}$ decays