Labour Market and Social Policy in Italy: Challenges and Changes. Bertelsmann Policy Brief #2016/02

vEight years after the outbreak of the financial crisis, Italy has still to cope with and overcome a plethora of economic and social challenges. On top of this, it faces an unfavourable demographic structure and severe disparities between its northern and southern regions. Some promising reforms have recently been enacted, specifically targeting poverty and social exclusion. However, much more remains to be done on the way towards greater economic stability and widely shared prosperity

Event Stream Processing with Multiple Threads

Current runtime verification tools seldom make use of multi-threading to speed up the evaluation of a property on a large event trace. In this paper, we present an extension to the BeepBeep 3 event stream engine that allows the use of multiple threads during the evaluation of a query. Various parallelization strategies are presented and described on simple examples. The implementation of these strategies is then evaluated empirically on a sample of problems. Compared to the previous, single-threaded version of the BeepBeep engine, the allocation of just a few threads to specific portions of a query provides dramatic improvement in terms of running time

A Taxonomy for Classifying Runtime Verification Tools

International audienceOver the last 15 years Runtime Verification (RV) has grown into a diverse and active field, which has stimulated the development of numerous theoretical frameworks and tools. Many of the tools are at first sight very different and challenging to compare. Yet, there are similarities. In this work, we classify RV tools within a high-level taxonomy of concepts. We first present this taxonomy and discuss the different dimensions. Then, we survey RV tools and classify them according to the taxonomy. This paper constitutes a snapshot of the current state of the art and enables a comparison of existing tools

Fully-automated Runtime Enforcement of Component-based Systems with Formal and Sound Recovery

International audienceWe introduce runtime enforcement of specifications on component-based systems (CBS) modeled in the BIP (Behavior, Interaction and Priority) framework. Runtime enforcement is an increasingly popular and effective dynamic validation technique aiming to ensure the correct runtime behavior (w.r.t. a formal specification) of a system using a so-called enforcement monitor. BIP is a powerful and expressive component-based framework for the formal construction of heterogeneous systems. Because of BIP expressiveness however , it is difficult to enforce complex behavioral properties at design-time. We first introduce a theoretical runtime enforcement framework for component-based systems where we delineate a hierarchy of enforceable properties (i.e., properties that can be enforced) according to the number of observational steps a system is allowed to deviate from the property (i.e., the notion of k-step enforceability). To ensure the observational equivalence between the correct executions of the initial system and the monitored system, we show that i) only stutter-invariant properties should be enforced on CBS with our monitors, and ii) safety properties are 1-step enforceable. Second, given an abstract enforcement monitor for some 1-step enforceable property, we define a series of formal transformations to instrument (at relevant locations) a CBS described in the BIP framework to integrate the monitor. At runtime, the monitor observes and automatically avoids any error in the behavior of the system w.r.t. the property. Third, our approach is fully implemented in RE-BIP, an available tool integrated in the BIP tool suite. Fourth, to validate our approach, we use RE-BIP to i) enforce deadlock-freedom on a dining philosophers benchmark, and ii) ensure the correct placement of robots on a map

A Multiset Rewriting Model for Specifying and Verifying Timing Aspects of Security Protocols

Catherine Meadows has played an important role in the advancement of formal methods for protocol security verification. Her insights on the use of, for example, narrowing and rewriting logic has made possible the automated discovery of new attacks and the shaping of new protocols. Meadows has also investigated other security aspects, such as, distance-bounding protocols and denial of service attacks. We have been greatly inspired by her work. This paper describes the use of Multiset Rewriting for the specification and verification of timing aspects of protocols, such as network delays, timeouts, timed intruder models and distance-bounding properties. We detail these timed features with a number of examples and describe decidable fragments of related verification problems

The hitchhiker's guide to decidability and complexity of equivalence properties in security protocols

International audiencePrivacy-preserving security properties in cryptographic protocols are typically modelled by observational equivalences in process calculi such as the applied pi-calulus. We survey decidability and complexity results for the automated verification of such equivalences, casting existing results in a common framework which allows for a precise comparison. This unified view, beyond providing a clearer insight on the current state of the art, allowed us to identify some variations in the statements of the decision problems-sometimes resulting in different complexity results. Additionally, we prove a couple of novel or strengthened results

StreamLAB: Stream-based Monitoring of Cyber-Physical Systems

With ever increasing autonomy of cyber-physical systems, monitoring becomes an integral part for ensuring the safety of the system at runtime. StreamLAB is a monitoring framework with high degree of expressibility and strong correctness guarantees. Specifications are written in RTLola, a stream-based specification language with formal semantics. StreamLAB provides an extensive analysis of the specification, including the computation of memory consumption and run-time guarantees. We demonstrate the applicability of StreamLAB on typical monitoring tasks for cyber-physical systems, such as sensor validation and system health checks

An Environment for the ParTraP Trace Property Language (Tool Demonstration)

International audienceWe present ParTraP and its associated toolset, supporting a lightweight approach to formal methods. In critical systems, such as medical systems, it is often easy to enhance the code with tracing information. ParTraP is an expressive language that allows to express properties over traces of parametric events. It is designed to ease the understanding and writing of properties by software engineers without background in formal methods. In this tool demonstration, we will present the language and its toolset: compiler, syntax directed editor, and a prototype generator of examples and counterexamples. Abstract. We present ParTraP and its associated toolset, supporting a lightweight approach to formal methods. In critical systems, such as medical systems, it is often easy to enhance the code with tracing information. ParTraP is an expressive language that allows to express properties over traces of parametric events. It is designed to ease the understanding and writing of properties by software engineers without background in formal methods. In this tool demonstration, we will present the language and its toolset: compiler, syntax directed editor, and a prototype generator of examples and counterexamples