Современные методы анализа риска аварий и пожаров на опасных химических объектах

Объектом исследования является фармацевтическое производство, на котором располагается цех с сушильной установкой. Данная установка – аэрофонтанная сушилка, предназначена для сушки пара-нитробензойной кислоты на производстве. Готовый продукт способен образовывать пылевоздушную, взрывоопасную смесь. В случае взрыва это может привести к непоправимым последствиям на предприятии.The object of the study is the pharmaceutical production, on which the drying plant is located. This installation is an aerophone dryer, designed for drying para- nitrobenzoic acid in production. The finished product is capable of forming a dusty, explosive mixture. In the case of an explosion, this can lead to irreparable consequences in the enterprise

Crystal structure of Porphyromonas gingivalis dipeptidyl peptidase 4 and structure-activity relationships based on inhibitor profiling

The Gram-negative anaerobe Porphyromonas gingivalis is associated with chronic periodontitis. Clinical isolates of P. gingivalis strains with high dipeptidyl peptidase 4 (DPP4) expression also had a high capacity for biofilm formation and were more infective. The X-ray crystal structure of P. gingivalis DPP4 was solved at 2.2 Å resolution. Despite a sequence identity of 32%, the overall structure of the dimer was conserved between P. gingivalis DPP4 and mammalian orthologues. The structures of the substrate binding sites were also conserved, except for the region called S2-extensive, which is exploited by specific human DPP4 inhibitors currently used as antidiabetic drugs. Screening of a collection of 450 compounds as inhibitors revealed a structure-activity relationship that mimics in part that of mammalian DPP9. The functional similarity between human and bacterial DPP4 was confirmed using 124 potential peptide substrates

A database of threat statuses and life-history traits of Red List species in Flanders (northern Belgium)

Red Lists estimate the extinction risk of species at global or regional levels and are important instruments in conservation policies. Global Red List assessments are readily available via the IUCN website (https://www.iucnredlist.org) and are regularly updated by (taxonomic) experts. Regional Red Lists, however, are not always easy to find and often use local criteria to assess the local extinction risk of species. Here, we publish a database with the outcome of 38 Red List assessments in Flanders (northern Belgium) between 1994 and 2018. In total, the database contains 6,224 records of 5,039 unique taxa pertaining to 24 different taxonomic groups. Using a quality control procedure, we evaluated the criteria used, the number of records, the temporal and spatial distribution of the data and the up-to-dateness of the Red Lists. This way, nineteen Red Lists were approved as being of sufficient high quality (i.e. validated) and nineteen others were not. Once validated, Red Lists are approved by the regional Minister of Environment and published in the Belgian Official Gazette acquiring legal status. For the validated Red Lists, we additionally compiled (life-history) traits that are applicable to a wide variety of species groups (taxonomic kingdom, environment, biotope, nutrient level, dispersal capacity, lifespan and cuddliness). The publication of this dataset allows comparison of Red List statuses with other European regions and countries and permits analyses about how certain (life-history) traits can explain the Red List status of species. The dataset will be regularly updated by adding new Red List (re)assessments and/or additional (life-history) traits

Towards a platform for empirical software design studies

© 2017 IEEE. The process of empirical research is founded on careful study design, sound instantiation and planning of the study, and the systematic collection and processing of data. These activities require extensive expertise and know-how, are repetitive, laborious and error-prone, and adequate tool support is currently lacking, particularly in support of empirical software engineering research. In this paper, we outline our vision of an integrated end-to-end tool platform that supports these activities and we elaborate on what it would take for such a platform to become a (re)usable platform for the research community.status: publishe

Towards systematically addressing security variability in software product lines

With the increasingly pervasive role of software in society, security is becoming an important quality concern, emphasizing security by design, but it requires intensive specialization. Security in families of systems is even harder, as diverse variants of security solutions must be considered, with even different security goals per product. Furthermore, security is not a static object but a moving target, adding variability. For this, an approach to systematically address security concerns in software product lines is needed. It should consider security separate from other variability dimensions. The main challenges to realize this are: (i) expressing security and its variability, (ii) selecting the right solution, (iii) properly instantiating a solution, and (iv) verifying and validating it. In this paper, we present our research agenda towards addressing the aforementioned challenges.status: publishe

Solution-aware data flow diagrams for security threat modeling

Threat modelling refers to a number of systematic approaches for eliciting security and/or privacy threats. Data Flow Diagrams (DFDs) are the main input for threat modelling techniques such as Microsoft STRIDE or LINDDUN. They represent system-level abstractions that lack any architectural knowledge on existing security solutions. However, this is not how software is built in practice: there are often previously-made security- and privacy-relevant decisions that originate from the technological context or domain, reuse, or external dependencies. Not taking these into account leads to the enumeration of many non-applicable threats during threat modelling. While recording the effect of these decisions on individual elements can provide some relief, the lack of a proper first-class representation causes conflicts when modifying the architecture and inhibits traceability between effect and decision. In this paper, we enrich Data Flow Diagrams with security solution elements, which are taken into account during threat elicitation. Our modelling approach is supported by a proof-of-concept implementation of a threat modelling framework and validated in the context of a STRIDE analysis of an industrial video conferencing solution that is based onWebRTC. The presented DFD enrichments are a key enabler for future efforts towards dynamic and continuous threat modeling.status: Published onlin

SPARTA: Security & privacy architecture through risk-driven threat assessment

The development of secure and privacy-preserving software systems entails the continuous consideration of the security and privacy aspects of the system under development. While contemporary software development practices do support such a continuous approach towards software development, existing threat modeling activities are commonly executed as single-shot efforts leading to a single, historic, and quickly obsolete view on the security and privacy of the system. This disconnect leads to undetected new issues and wasted efforts on already resolved problems, effectively accruing technical debt. The presented SPARTA prototype facilitates the consideration of security and privacy by providing support for: (i) capturing security and privacy design decisions in a DFD-based architectural abstraction, (ii) continuous threat elicitation on this knowledge-enriched abstraction, and (iii) risk analysis of the elicited threats for prioritizing security and privacy efforts. By capturing and continuously assessing the impact of security and privacy design decisions on the elicited threats, the progress towards securing the system can be assessed and alternatives can be compared, taking into account past and present design decisions.status: Published onlin

Risk-based design security analysis

Implementing security by design in practice often involves the application of threat modeling techniques to elicit security threats and to aid designers in focusing their security efforts on the most stringent problems first. Existing threat modeling methodologies are capable of generating lots of threats, yet they lack even basic support to triage these threats, except for relying on the expertise and manual assessment by the threat modeler. Since the essence of creating a secure design is to minimize associated risk (taking into account the cost of countermeasures), risk analysis approaches offer a very compelling solution to this problem. By combining risk analysis and threat modeling, elicited threats in a design can be enriched with risk analysis information in order to provide support in triaging and prioritizing threats and focusing security efforts on the high-risk threats. It requires the following inputs: the asset values, the strengths of countermeasures (taking vulnerabilities into account as well), and an attacker model. In his paper, we provide an integrated threat elicitation and risk analysis approach, implemented in a threat modeling tool prototype, and evaluate it using a real-world application, namely the SecureDrop whistleblower submission system. We show that the security measures implemented in SecureDrop indeed correspond to the high-risk threats identified by our approach. Therefore, the risk-based security analysis provides useful guidance on focusing security efforts on the most important problems first.status: Published onlin

Interaction-based privacy threat elicitation

Threat modeling involves the systematic identification, elicitation, and analysis of privacy- and/or security-related threats in the context of a specific system. These modeling practices are performed at a specific level of architectural abstraction – the use of Data Flow Diagram (DFD) models, for example, is common in this context. To identify and elicit threats, two fundamentally different approaches can be taken: (1) elicitation on a per-element basis involves iteratively singling out individual architectural elements and considering the applicable threats, (2) elicitation at the level of system interactions (which involve the local context of three elements: a source, a data flow, and a destination) performs elicitation at the basis of system-level communication. Although not considering the local context of the element under investigation makes the former approach easier to adopt and use for human analysts, this approach also leads to threat duplication and redundancy, relies more extensively on implicit analyst expertise, and requires more manual effort. In this paper, we provide a detailed analysis of these issues with element-based threat elicitation in the context of LINDDUN, an element-driven privacy-by-design threat modeling methodology. Subsequently, we present a LINDDUN extension that implements interaction-based privacy threat elicitation and we provide in-depth argumentation on how this approach leads to better process guidance and more concrete interpretation of privacy threat types, ultimately requiring less effort and expertise. A third standalone contribution of this work is a catalog of realistic and illustrative LINDDUN privacy threats, which in turn facilitates practical threat elicitation using LINDDUN.status: Published onlin