A goal of runtime monitoring is to observe software execution to determine whether it complies with its intended behavior. Monitoring allows one to analyze and recover from detected faults, providing prevention activities against catastrophic failure. Although runtime monitoring has been in use for so many years, there is renewed interest in its application largely because of the increasing complexity and ubiquitous nature of software systems. To address such a demand for runtime monitoring and behavioral analysis of software systems, we present RUMBA framework. It utilizes a synergy between static and dynamic analyses to evaluate whether a program behavior complies with specified properties during its execution. The framework is comprised of three steps, namely: i) Extracting Architecture where reverse engineering techniques are used to extract two meta-models of a Java system by utilizing UML-compliant and graph representations of the system model, ii) Seeding Objectives in which information required for filtering runtime events is obtained based on properties that are defined in OCL (Object Constraint Language) as specifications for the behavioral analysis, and iii) Runtime Monitoring and Analysis where behavior of the system is monitored according to the output of the previous stages, and then is analyzed based on the objective properties. The first and the second stages are static while the third one is dynamic. A prototype of our framework has been developed in Java programming language. We have performed a set of empirical studies on the proposed framework to assess the techniques introduced in this thesis. We have also evaluated the efficiency of the RUMBA framework in terms of processor and memory utilization for the case study applications.

Mobility occurs naturally in many distributed system applications such as telecommunications and electronic commerce. Mobility may reduce bandwidth consumption and coupling and increase flexibility. However, it seems that relatively little work has been done to support quality assurance techniques such as testing and verification of mobile systems. This thesis describes an approach for checking the conformance of a mobile, distributed application with respect to an executable model at runtime. The approach is based on kiltera -- a novel, high-level language supporting the description and execution of models of concurrent, mobile, distributed, and timed computation. The approach allows distributed, rather than centralized, monitoring. However, it makes very few assumptions about the platform that the mobile agent system is implemented in. We have implemented our approach and validated it using four case studies. Two of them are examples of mobile agent systems, the two others are implementations of distributed algorithms. Our approach was able to detect seeded faults in the implementations. To check the effectiveness and the efficiency of our approach more comprehensively a mutation-based evaluation framework has been implemented. In this framework a set of a new mutation operators for mobile agent systems has been identified in order to automatically generate and run a number of mutants programs and then evaluate the ability of our approach to detect these mutants. We found that our approach is very effective and efficient in killing the non-equivalent mutants. / Thesis (Ph.D, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2010-04-27 12:35:47.996

Important aspects of the IoT concept include privacy and security. There are various examples from the past, where implementation of security was insuffi- cient, which allowed hackers to gain unauthorized access to tens of thousands of everyday objects connected to the Internet and abuse this power to par- alyze the communication over the Internet. In this thesis we designed and implemented the Glinior tool that allows to define the contracts between objects or components in the application, and ensures that the communi- cation between specified objects or components happens according to those contracts. The Glinior tool uses techniques of dynamic analysis to verify contracts defined by the user. This is done by using the JVMTI framework with combination of the ASM library for bytecode manipulation.

In this dissertation we seek to identify ways in which the systems development life cycle (SDLC) can be augmented with improved software engineering practices to measurably address security concerns that have arisen relating to security vulnerability defects in software. By proposing a general model for identifying potential vulnerabilities (weaknesses) and using runtime monitoring for verifying their reachability and exploitability during development and testing reduces security risk in delivered products. We propose a form of contract for our monitoring framework that is used to specify the environmental and system security conditions necessary for the generation of probes that monitor security assertions during runtime to verify suspected vulnerabilities. Our assertion-based security monitoring framework, based on contracts and probes, known as the Contract-Based Security Assertion Monitoring Framework (CB_SAMF) can be employed for verifying and reacting to suspected vulnerabilities in the application and kernel layers of the Linux operating system. Our methodology for integrating CB_SAMF into SDLC during development and testing to verify suspected vulnerabilities reduces the human effort by allowing developers to focus on fixing verified vulnerabilities. Metrics intended for the weighting, prioritizing, establishing confidence, and detectability of potential vulnerability categories are also introduced. These metrics and weighting approaches identify deficiencies in security assurance programs/products and also help focus resources towards a class of suspected vulnerabilities, or a detection method, which may presently be outside of the requirements and priorities of the system. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of using contracts to verify exploitability of suspected vulnerabilities across five input validation related vulnerability types, combining our contracts with existing static analysis detection mechanisms, and measurably improving security assurance processes/products used in an enhanced SDLC. As a result of this evaluation we introduced two new security assurance test suites, through collaborations with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), replacing existing test suites. The new and revised test cases provide numerous improvements to consistency, accuracy, and preciseness along with enhanced test case metadata to aid researchers using the Software Assurance Reference Dataset (SARD). / Graduate

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Software is the crux of many commercial, industrial and military systems. The software systems need to be very reliable especially in case of safety critical systems. Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and manned aircraft are safety critical systems and hence failures related to software or software-hardware interaction leads to huge problems. The software systems need to be certified before they are deployed. Even after being certified several accidents and incidents have occurred and are occurring. The software errors can occur during any phase of software development. The reliability of the software is enhanced using the verification process. Runtime monitoring has various advantages over testing and model checking. Hence this thesis work explores runtime monitoring of UAV. The runtime monitoring shall verify the run of the current system state. The runtime monitoring shall monitor the health of the UAV and shall report to the operator about its status. The software faults and errors if not prevented shall lead to software failure. UAV lacks the situational awareness due to absence of pilot onboard. This motivated to use runtime monitor to enhance the situation awareness. The runtime monitor shall detect the software errors and avoid failures. This monitor shall also enhance the situational awareness of the remote operator. The runtime monitor that enhance situation awareness shall not only be applicable to specific UAV but this shall be applicable to all the UAV’s. Hence this work provides an independent Generic Runtime Monitor (GRM) to enhance the situation awareness. The runtime monitor has various methods but using formal specifications in specific using Linear Temporal Logic(LTL) to generate monitor is considered in this work. Runtime monitoring makes UAV more safe and at the same time reduces the costs as it verifies only the current run of the system state by providing a detection of critical errors. The situation awareness includes functional and environmental states that remote pilot shall not be aware of. The architecture plays vital role for the system design. GRM architecture is one such architecture which chalks out the overall independent system design for the runtime monitoring of the UAV system. This architecture is an extensible one. The generic requirements were elicited from different sources such as Aircraft Incidents and Accidents, Boeing Aero Magazine, Autonomous Rotorcraft Testbed for Intelligent Systems (ARTIS) requirements, generic Autonomy Levels for Unmanned Rotorcraft Systems (ALFURS) framework etc. The situation awareness can be categorized into three levels namely perception, comprehension and projection. The requirements were elicited for all the three levels of situation awareness. These requirements further formalized using temporal logics. The formalized requirements further translated into state automaton automatically.

Software is the crux of many commercial, industrial and military systems. The software systems need to be very reliable especially in case of safety critical systems. Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and manned aircraft are safety critical systems and hence failures related to software or software-hardware interaction leads to huge problems. The software systems need to be certified before they are deployed. Even after being certified several accidents and incidents have occurred and are occurring. The software errors can occur during any phase of software development. The reliability of the software is enhanced using the verification process. Runtime monitoring has various advantages over testing and model checking. Hence this thesis work explores runtime monitoring of UAV. The runtime monitoring shall verify the run of the current system state. The runtime monitoring shall monitor the health of the UAV and shall report to the operator about its status. The software faults and errors if not prevented shall lead to software failure. UAV lacks the situational awareness due to absence of pilot onboard. This motivated to use runtime monitor to enhance the situation awareness. The runtime monitor shall detect the software errors and avoid failures. This monitor shall also enhance the situational awareness of the remote operator. The runtime monitor that enhance situation awareness shall not only be applicable to specific UAV but this shall be applicable to all the UAV’s. Hence this work provides an independent Generic Runtime Monitor (GRM) to enhance the situation awareness. The runtime monitor has various methods but using formal specifications in specific using Linear Temporal Logic(LTL) to generate monitor is considered in this work. Runtime monitoring makes UAV more safe and at the same time reduces the costs as it verifies only the current run of the system state by providing a detection of critical errors. The situation awareness includes functional and environmental states that remote pilot shall not be aware of. The architecture plays vital role for the system design. GRM architecture is one such architecture which chalks out the overall independent system design for the runtime monitoring of the UAV system. This architecture is an extensible one. The generic requirements were elicited from different sources such as Aircraft Incidents and Accidents, Boeing Aero Magazine, Autonomous Rotorcraft Testbed for Intelligent Systems (ARTIS) requirements, generic Autonomy Levels for Unmanned Rotorcraft Systems (ALFURS) framework etc. The situation awareness can be categorized into three levels namely perception, comprehension and projection. The requirements were elicited for all the three levels of situation awareness. These requirements further formalized using temporal logics. The formalized requirements further translated into state automaton automatically.