Biblio

Dynamic adaptation should not leave a software system in an inconsistent state, as it could lead to failure. Prior research has used inter-component dependency models of a system to determine a safe interval for the adaptation of its components, where the most important tradeoff is between disruption in the operations of the system and reachability of safe intervals. This article presents Savasana, which automatically analyzes a software system’s code to extract both inter- and intra-component dependencies. In this way, Savasana is able to obtain more fine-grained models compared to previous approaches. Savasana then uses the detailed models to find safe adaptation intervals that cannot be determined using techniques from prior research. This allows Savasana to achieve a better tradeoff between disruption and reachability. The article demonstrates how Savasana infers safe adaptation intervals for components of a software system under various use cases and conditions.

In parallel with the meteoric rise of mobile software, we are witnessing an alarming escalation in the number and sophistication of the security threats targeted at mobile platforms, particularly Android, as the dominant platform. While existing research has made significant progress towards detection and mitigation of Android security, gaps and challenges remain. This paper contributes a comprehensive taxonomy to classify and characterize the state-of-the-art research in this area. We have carefully followed the systematic literature review process, and analyzed the results of more than 300 research papers, resulting in the most comprehensive and elaborate investigation of the literature in this area of research. The systematic analysis of the research literature has revealed patterns, trends, and gaps in the existing literature, and underlined key challenges and opportunities that will shape the focus of future research efforts.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) provides middleware resources to cloud customers. As demand for PaaS services increases, so do concerns about the security of PaaS. This paper discusses principal PaaS security and integrity requirements, and vulnerabilities and the corresponding countermeasures. We consider three core cloud elements: multi-tenancy, isolation, and virtualization and how they relate to PaaS services and security trends and concerns such as user and resource isolation, side-channel vulnerabilities in multi-tenant environments, and protection of sensitive data

We propose Cupid, a language for specifying commitments that supports their information-centric aspects, and offers crucial benefits.  One, Cupid is first-order, enabling a systematic treatment of commitment instances.  Two, Cupid supports features needed for real-world scenarios such as deadlines, nested commitments, and complex event expressions for capturing the lifecycle of commitment instances.  Three, Cupid maps to relational database queries and thus provides a set-based semantics for retrieving commitment instances in states such as being violated,discharged, and so on.  We prove that Cupid queries are safe.  Four,to aid commitment modelers, we propose the notion of well-identified commitments, and finitely violable and finitely expirable commitments.  We give syntactic restrictions for obtaining such commitments.

Smart home automation and IoT promise to bring many advantages but they also expose their users to certain security and privacy vulnerabilities. For example, leaking the information about the absence of a person from home or the medicine somebody is taking may have serious security and privacy consequences for home users and potential legal implications for providers of home automation and IoT platforms. We envision that a new ecosystem within an existing smartphone ecosystem will be a suitable platform for distribution of apps for smart home and IoT devices. Android is increasingly becoming a popular platform for smart home and IoT devices and applications. Built-in security mechanisms in ecosystems such as Android have limitations that can be exploited by malicious apps to leak users’ sensitive data to unintended recipients. For instance, Android enforces that an app requires the Internet permissions in order to access a web server but it does not control which servers the app talks to or what data it shares with other apps. Therefore, sub-ecosystems that enforce additional fine-grained custom policies on top of existing policies of the smartphone ecosystems are necessary for smart home or IoT platforms. To this end, we have built a tool that enforces additional policies on inter-app interactions and permissions of Android apps. We have done preliminary testing of our tool on three proprietary apps developed by a future provider of a home automation platform. Our initial evaluation demonstrates that it is possible to develop mechanisms that allow definition and enforcement of custom security policies appropriate for ecosystems of the like smart home automation and IoT.

Research shows that commonly accepted security requirements are not generally applied in practice. Instead of relying on requirements checklists, security experts rely on their expertise and background knowledge to identify security vulnerabilities. To understand the gap between available checklists and practice, we conducted a series of interviews to encode the decision-making process of security experts and novices during security requirements analysis. Participants were asked to analyze two types of artifacts: source code, and network diagrams for vulnerabilities and to apply a requirements checklist to mitigate some of those vulnerabilities. We framed our study using Situation Awareness-a cognitive theory from psychology-to elicit responses that we later analyzed using coding theory and grounded analysis. We report our preliminary results of analyzing two interviews that reveal possible decision-making patterns that could characterize how analysts perceive, comprehend and project future threats which leads them to decide upon requirements and their specifications, in addition, to how experts use assumptions to overcome ambiguity in specifications. Our goal is to build a model that researchers can use to evaluate their security requirements methods against how experts transition through different situation awareness levels in their decision-making process.

Concurrent programs are prone to various classes of difficult-to-detect faults, of which data races are particularly prevalent. Prior work has attempted to increase the cost-effectiveness of approaches for testing for data races by employing race detection techniques, but to date, no work has considered cost-effective approaches for re-testing for races as programs evolve. In this paper we present SimRT, an automated regression testing framework for use in detecting races introduced by code modifications. SimRT employs a regression test selection technique, focused on sets of program elements related to race detection, to reduce the number of test cases that must be run on a changed program to detect races that occur due to code modifications, and it employs a test case prioritization technique to improve the rate at which such races are detected. Our empirical study of SimRT reveals that it is more efficient and effective for revealing races than other approaches, and that its constituent test selection and prioritization components each contribute to its performance.

Breaches of software security affect millions of people, and therefore it is crucial to strive for more secure software systems. However, the effect of programming language design on software security is not easily measured or studied. In the absence of scientific insight, opinions range from those that claim that programming language design has no effect on security of the system, to those that believe that programming language design is the only way to provide “high-assurance software.” In this paper, we discuss how programming language design can impact software security by looking at a specific example: the Wyvern programming language. We report on how the design of the Wyvern programming language leverages security principles, together with hypotheses about how usability impacts security, in order to prevent command injection attacks. Furthermore, we discuss what security principles we considered in Wyvern’s design.

The process of software development and evolution has proven difficult to improve. For example,  well documented security issues such as SQL injection (SQLi), after more than a decade, still top  most vulnerability lists. Quantitative security process and quality metrics are often subdued due to  lack of time and resources. Security problems are hard to quantify and even harder to predict or  relate to any process improvement activity.  The goal of this thesis is to assess usefulness of “classical” software reliability engineering (SRE)  models in the context of open source software security, the conditions under which they may be  useful, and the information that they can provide with respect to the security quality of a software  product.  We start with security problem reports for open source Fedora series of software releases.We  illustrate how one can learn from normal operational profile about the non-operational processes  related to security problems. One aspect is classification of security problems based on the human  traits that contribute to the injection of problems into code, whether due to poor practices or limited  knowledge (epistemic errors), or due to random accidental events (aleatoric errors). Knowing the  distribution aids in development of an attack profile. In the case of Fedora, the distribution of  security problems found post-release was consistent across four different releases of the software.  The security problem discovery rate appears to be roughly constant but much lower than the initial  non-security problem discovery rate. Previous work has shown that non-operational testing can help  accelerate and focus the problem discovery rate and that it can be successfully modeled.We find  that some classical reliability models can be used with success to estimate the residual number of  security problems, and through that provide a measure of the security characteristics of the software.  We propose an agile software testing process that combines operational and non-operational (or  attack related) testing with the intent of finding more security problems faster. 

Three years ago in this venue, Cook argued that in their essence, objects are what Reynolds called procedural data structures. His observation raises a natural question: if procedural data structures are the essence of objects, has this contributed to the empirical success of objects, and if so, how? This essay attempts to answer that question. After reviewing Cook's definition, I propose the term service abstractions to capture the essential nature of objects. This terminology emphasizes, following Kay, that objects are not primarily about representing and manipulating data, but are more about providing services in support of higher-level goals. Using examples taken from object-oriented frameworks, I illustrate the unique design leverage that service abstractions provide: the ability to define abstractions that can be extended, and whose extensions are interoperable in a first-class way. The essay argues that the form of interoperable extension supported by service abstractions is essential to modern software: many modern frameworks and ecosystems could not have been built without service abstractions. In this sense, the success of objects was not a coincidence: it was an inevitable consequence of their service abstraction nature.

The simplest and purest practical object-oriented language designs today are seen in dynamically-typed languages, such as Smalltalk and Self. Static types, however, have potential benefits for productivity, security, and reasoning about programs. In this paper, we describe the design of Wyvern, a statically typed, pure object-oriented language that attempts to retain much of the simplicity and expressiveness of these iconic designs. Our goals lead us to combine pure object-oriented and functional abstractions in a simple, typed setting. We present a foundational object-based language that we believe to be as close as one can get to simple typed lambda calculus while keeping object-orientation. We show how this foundational language can be translated to the typed lambda calculus via standard encodings. We then define a simple extension to this language that introduces classes and show that classes are no more than sugar for the foundational object-based language. Our future intention is to demonstrate that modules and other object-oriented features can be added to our language as not more than such syntactical extensions while keeping the object-oriented core as pure as possible. The design of Wyvern closely follows both historical and modern ideas about the essence of object-orientation, suggesting a new way to think about a minimal, practical, typed core language for objects.

Access policies are hard to express in existing programming languages. However, their accurate expression is a prerequisite for many of today's applications. We propose a new language that uses classes, first-class relationships, and first-class states to express access policies in a more declarative and fine-grained way than existing solutions allow.

Researchers interested in security often wish to introduce new primitives into a language. Extensible languages hold promise in such scenarios, but only if the extension mechanism is sufficiently safe and expressive. This paper describes several modifications to an extensible language motivated by end-to-end security concerns.