Selected contributions from the Open Source Software Certification (OpenCert) workshops

We present to you this special issue dedicated to the 2nd, 3rd and 4th editions of the International Workshop on Foundations and Techniques for Open Source Software Certification (OpenCert) held in 2008 (Milan, Italy), 2009 (York, UK) and 2010 (Pisa, Italy) respectively. This is a compilation of a selected set of extended papers presented at these workshops. OpenCert provides for a unique venue advancing the state of the art in the analysis and assurance of open source software with an ultimate aim of achieving certification and standards. The dramatic growth in open source software over recent years has provided for a fertile ground for fundamental research and demonstrative case studies. Over the years, OpenCert has enabled a thriving community, small but focused, examining issues ranging from certification to security and safety analysis for applications areas as diverse as railways, aviation, knowledge management, sustainable development, and the open source developers community

Feature trade-off analysis for reconnaissance detection.

An effective cyber early warning system (CEWS) should pick up threat activity at an early stage, with an emphasis on establishing hypotheses and predictions as well as generating alerts on (unclassified) situations based on preliminary indications. The design and implementation of such early warning systems involve numerous challenges such as generic set of indicators, intelligence gathering, uncertainty reasoning and information fusion. This chapter begins with an understanding of the behaviours of intruders and then related literature is followed by the proposed methodology using a Bayesian inference-based system. It also includes a carefully deployed empirical analysis on a data set labelled for reconnaissance activity. Finally, the chapter concludes with a discussion on results, research challenges and necessary suggestions to move forward in this research line

Fabrication and Evaluation of Floating Mucoadhesive Tablets of Cefpodoxime Proxetil Using Factorial Design

The present research work aims to fabricate and optimize gastroretentive floating mucoadhesive tablets of Cefpodoxime Proxetil, so as to remain in the gastric region for appropriate hours and hence significantly prolong the gastric residence time of drugs which improve bioavailability. Floating-Mucoadhesive tablets of Cefpodoxime Proxetil were prepared by direct compression method using various polymers such as HPMC K 200 M, Carbopol 940P. Sodium Bicarbonate & Citric acid was incorporated as a gas-generating agents and HPMC K 200 M, Carbopol 940 P was incorporated as Mucoadhesive agent. Optimization study was carried out by using 32 factorial design. The concentration of polymers was considered as independent variables whereas Floating lag time,Swelling Index, Mucoadhesive Strength, of the tablets were utilized as dependent variables. The floating- Mucoadhesive tablets were evaluated for weight variation, hardness, thickness, friability, drug content, in-vitro buoyancy study, and in-vitro and ex-vivo Mucoadhesive studies, swelling index and in-vitro dissolution studies. The study reveals the significant effect of the amount of polymers on Floating lag time, Swelling Index, Mucoadhesive Strength of the tablets. FTIR, DSC study indicates no drug-excipients interaction in the prepared formulations. The prepared tablets exhibited satisfactory physico-chemical characteristics. All prepared batches shown good in-vitro buoyancy studies and Mucoadhesion studies. The In-vitro dissolution profiles of optimized floating- Mucoadhesive formulation of Cefpodoxime Proxetil were found to sustained the drug release up to 12 hrs and release can be extended for longer period over 12 hrs by increasing the concentration of polymers. The best result from optimized batches is of AT5 which gives floating lag time 21±2, Mucoadhesive strength 16.60 gm & drug release 98.65% in 12 hrs. Floating- Mucoadhesive tablet were prepared and could be a promising approach to deliver  Cefpodoxime Proxetil with improved gastric residence time which improve bioavailability &  effective in the management of the bacterial infection. Keywords: Cefpodoxime Proxetil, , HPMC K200M, Carbopol 940P,Floating-Mucoadhesive, factorial desig

Analysis of Collaboration Effectiveness and Individuals’ Contribution in FLOSS Communities

Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) development has proven itself over the years to be able to deliver high-quality software products.  However, it is not clear how quality emerges from the large amount of loosely organised activities of a FLOSS community.  This makes it difficult to apply traditional quality metrics and certification processes to FLOSS products. This paper investigates possible indicators of collaboration effectiveness and quality of individuals’ contribution that could be extracted from the data available in repositories of FLOSS projects. The ultimate purpose of this effort is to develop quantitative metrics for these indicators and merge such metrics into a global metric for FLOSS software quality to be used in a certification process

Towards a threat assessment framework for apps collusion

App collusion refers to two or more apps working together to achieve a malicious goal that they otherwise would not be able to achieve individually. The permissions based security model of Android does not address this threat as it is rather limited to mitigating risks of individual apps. This paper presents a technique for quantifying the collusion threat, essentially the first step towards assessing the collusion risk. The proposed method is useful in finding the collusion candidate of interest which is critical given the high volume of Android apps available. We present our empirical analysis using a classified corpus of over 29,000 Android apps provided by Intel SecurityTM

Participation of Female Students in Computer Science Education: Case Study

Case stud