Thesis (M.S. in computer science)--Washington State University, December 2009. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on Jan. 20, 2010). "School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science." Includes bibliographical references (p. 60-64).

The increased complexity, heterogeneity and the dynamism of networked systems and applications make current configuration and management tools to be ineffective. A new paradigm to dynamically configure and manage large-scale complex and heterogeneous networked systems is critically needed. In this dissertation, we present a self configuration paradigm based on the principles of autonomic computing that can handle efficiently complexity, dynamism and uncertainty in configuring networked systems and their applications. Our approach is based on making any resource/application to operate as an Autonomic Component (that means, it can be self-configured, self-healed, self-optimized and self-protected) by using two software modules: Component Management Interface (CMI) to specify the configuration and operational policies associated with each component and Component Runtime Manager (CRM) that manages the component configurations and operations using the policies defined in CMI. We use several configuration metrics (adaptability, complexity, latency, scalability, overhead, and effectiveness) to evaluate the effectiveness of our self-configuration approach when compared to other configuration techniques. We have used our approach to dynamically configure four systems: Automatic IT system management, Dynamic security configuration of networked systems, Self-management of data backup and disaster recovery system and Automatic security patches download and installation on a large scale test bed. Our experimental results showed that by applying our self-configuration approach, the initial configuration time, the initial configuration complexity and the dynamic configuration complexity can be reduced significantly. For example, the configuration time for security patches download and installation on nine machines is reduced to 4399 seconds from 27193 seconds. Furthermore our system provides most adaptability (e.g., 100% for Snort rule set configuration) comparing to hard coded approach (e.g., 22% for Snort rule set configuration) and can improve the performance of managed system greatly. For example, in data backup and recovery system, our approach can reduce the total cost by 54.1% when network bandwidth decreases. In addition, our framework is scalable and imposes very small overhead (less than 1%) on the managed system.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Alabama at Birmingham, 2007. / Additional advisors: Dale W. Callahan, Laurie Joiner, Helmuth F. Orthner, Gregg Vaughn. Description based on contents viewed Oct. 6, 2008; title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references.

Nowadays, as the use of computers is rapidly spreading to our life, software is getting more and more complex and large in computer systems. Therefore, the software configuration management (SCM) is playing an increasingly important role in the software development process. One of its significant activities is change management, which has an outstanding role in dealing with the continued and concurrent change requirements during the system development and use. In this report, we describe some basic activities of SCM, overview some representative SCM CASE tools with emphasizing on change management and analyze a possibility of integration of SCM version management tool (e.g., Subversion) and error management tool (e.g., Bugzialla) in order to provide an integrated software configuration management and change management. Moreover, a set of exercises based on RCS are developed, which illustrate some SCM simple activities and their modification to facilitate version management and change management.

This article presents a configuration management concept for software projects using Lyee methodology. To illustrate this concept, an introduction in configuration management is given. Then, the structure of Lyee programs is defined by sets and their dependencies. From this structure, the actual configuration management concept is deduced and discussed by rendering the structure for an existing configuration management testbed and describing the involved key players as well as the necessary procedures.

ITC/USA 2009 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Fifth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 26-29, 2009 / Riviera Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / Flight test instrumentation/data processing environments consist of three components: * Airborne Data Acquisition System * Telemetry Control Room * Post Test Data Processing System While these three components require the same setup information, most often they are configured separately using a different tool for each system. Vendor supplied tools generally do not interact very well with hardware other than their own. This results in the multiple entry of the configuration information. Multiple entries of data for large complex systems are susceptible to data entry errors as well as version synchronization issues. This paper describes the successful implementation of a single Microsoft Excel based tool being used to program the instrumentation data acquisition hardware, the real-time telemetry system, and the post test data processing system on an active test program. This tool leverages the XML interfaces provided by vendors of telemetry equipment.

Doctor of Philosophy / Computing and Information Sciences / Scott A. DeLoach / Xinming (Simon) Ou / The Moving Target Defense (MTD) concept has been proposed as an approach to rebalance the security landscape by increasing uncertainty and apparent complexity for attackers, reducing their window of opportunity, and raising the costs of their reconnaissance and attack efforts. Intuitively, the idea of applying MTD techniques to a whole IT system should provide enhanced security; however, little research has been done to show that it is feasible or beneficial to the system’s security. This dissertation presents an MTD platform at the whole IT system level in which any component of the IT system can be automatically and reliably replaced with a fresh new one. A component is simply a virtual machine (VM) instance or a cluster of instances. There are a number of security benefits when leveraging such an MTD platform. Replacing a VM instance with a new one with the most up-to-date operating system and applications eliminates security problems caused by unpatched vulnerabilities and all the privileges the attacker has obtained on the old instance. Configuration parameters for the new instance, such as IP address, port numbers for services, and credentials, can be changed from the old ones, invalidating the knowledge the attackers already obtained and forcing them to redo the work to re-compromise the new instance. In spite of these obvious security benefits, building a system that supports live replacement with minimal to no disruption to the IT system’s normal operations is difficult. Modern enterprise IT systems have complex dependencies among services so that changing even a single instance will almost certainly disrupt the dependent services. Therefore, the replacement of instances must be carefully orchestrated with updating the settings of the dependent instances. This orchestration of changes is notoriously error-prone if done manually, however, limited tool support is available to automate this process. We designed and built a framework (ANCOR) that captures the requirements and needs of a whole IT system (in particular, dependencies among various services) and compiles them into a working IT system. ANCOR is at the core of the proposed MTD platform (ANCOR-MTD) and enables automated live instance replacements. In order to evaluate the platform’s practicality, this dissertation presents a series of experiments on multiple IT systems that show negligible (statistically non-significant) performance impacts. To evaluate the platform’s efficacy, this research analyzes costs versus security benefits by quantifying the outcome (sizes of potential attack windows) in terms of the number of adaptations, and demonstrates that an IT system deployed and managed using the proposed MTD platform will increase attack difficulty.

The growth of applications for embedded processors has spawned a need for highly configurable devices. Custom microprocessors have long life cycles for a fast paced market, where as off-the-shelf designs often do not provide the level of configuration, nor the ability to allow system-on-chip designs. This paper presents a description for a software environment that allows designers to provide configuration options for a design, and responds by dynamically reconfiguring the environment to provide a ready to test design. A background survey is provided on current embedded RISC architectures, along with a proposed new embedded ISA and a cycle-level simulator. Justification is presented for a new instruction format to reduce code size with little loss to performance. A manual is also provided for the new ISA. / Graduation date: 2003

Even if software handover is a critical process in the lifecycle of a software system, there is still very little research   done within its domain. In this paper, we evaluate the taxonomy of handover activities as defined in EM3: Handover Process Model. We do it in an industrial setting in a context where a software system is handed over from a vendor conducting system development, evolution and maintenance to an acquirer using the system and conducting front-end support. Our results show that the taxonomy is realistic in the context studied. However, it misses some important deployment and training activities. / © 2010 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.QC 20120223

<p>One source of input data for software evolution research is data stored inside a software configuration management repository. The data includes different versions of a software system’s source code as well as version history metadata, such as check-in dates or log messages. Inherently, extracting this data manually is a time- and labor intensive task. The subsequent preprocessing step and the appropriate storage of the results, necessary to utilize the data for further analysis, is an additional effort for the researcher.</p><p>The goal of this thesis is to design and implement a front-end plug-in for an existing software comprehension tool, the VizzAnalyzer, providing the capability to extract and analyze multiple versions and evolutional information of software systems from SCM repositories and to store the results. Thereby, the implemented solution provides the infrastructure for software evolution research.</p>