Gigantically comprehensive and carefully researched, Security Engineering makes it clear just how difficult it is to protect information systems from corruption, eavesdropping, unauthorized use, and general malice. Better, Ross Anderson offers a lot of thoughts on how information can be made more secure (though probably not absolutely secure, at least not forever) with the help of both technologies and management strategies. His work makes fascinating reading and will no doubt inspire considerable doubt--fear is probably a better choice of words--in anyone with information to gather, protect, or make decisions about. Be aware: This is absolutely not a book solely about computers, with yet another explanation of Alice and Bob and how they exchange public keys in order to exchange messages in secret. Anderson explores, for example, the ingenious ways in which European truck drivers defeat their vehicles' speed-logging equipment. In another section, he shows how the end of the cold war brought on a decline in defenses against radio-frequency monitoring (radio frequencies can be used to determine, at a distance, what's going on in systems--bank teller machines, say), and how similar technology can be used to reverse-engineer the calculations that go on inside smart cards. In almost 600 pages of riveting detail, Anderson warns us not to be seduced by the latest defensive technologies, never to underestimate human ingenuity, and always use common sense in defending valuables. A terrific read for security professionals and general readers alike. --David Wall Topics covered: How some people go about protecting valuable things (particularly, but not exclusively, information) and how other people go about getting it anyway. Mostly, this takes the form of essays (about, for example, how the U.S. Air Force keeps its nukes out of the wrong hands) and stories (one of which tells of an art thief who defeated the latest technology by hiding in a closet). Sections deal with technologies, policies, psychology, and legal matters.

Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems

This paper presents a polynomial dimensional decomposition (PDD) method for global sensitivity analysis of stochastic systems subject to independent random input following arbitrary probability distributions. The method involves Fourier-polynomial expansions of lower-variate component functions of a stochastic response by measure-consistent orthonormal polynomial bases, analytical formulae for calculating the global sensitivity indices in terms of the expansion coefficients, and dimension-reduction integration for estimating the expansion coefficients. Due to identical dimensional structures of PDD and analysis-of-variance decomposition, the proposed method facilitates simple and direct calculation of the global sensitivity indices. Numerical results of the global sensitivity indices computed for smooth systems reveal significantly higher convergence rates of the PDD approximation than those from existing methods, including polynomial chaos expansion, random balance design, state-dependent parameter, improved Sobol’s method, and sampling-based methods. However, for non-smooth functions, the convergence properties of the PDD solution deteriorate to a great extent, warranting further improvements. The computational complexity of the PDD method is polynomial, as opposed to exponential, thereby alleviating the curse of dimensionality to some extent. Mathematical modeling of complex systems often requires sensitivity analysis to determine how an output variable of interest is influenced by individual or subsets of input variables. A traditional local sensitivity analysis entails gradients or derivatives, often invoked in design optimization, describing changes in the model response due to the local variation of input. Depending on the model output, obtaining gradients or derivatives, if they exist, can be simple or difficult. In contrast, a global sensitivity analysis (GSA), increasingly becoming mainstream, characterizes how the global variation of input, due to its uncertainty, impacts the overall uncertain behavior of the model. In other words, GSA constitutes the study of how the output uncertainty from a mathematical model is divvied up, qualitatively or quantitatively, to distinct sources of input variation in the model [1].

Reliability Engineering and System Safety

Technical foundations introduction software reliability and system reliability the operational profile software reliability modelling survey model evaluation and recalibration techniques practices and experiences best current practice of SRE software reliability measurement experience measurement-based analysis of software reliability software fault and failure classification techniques trend analysis in validation and maintenance software reliability and field data analysis software reliability process assessment emerging techniques software reliability prediction metrics software reliability and testing fault-tolerant SRE software reliability using fault trees software reliability process simulation neural networks and software reliability. Appendices: software reliability tools software failure data set repository.

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Handbook of software reliability engineering

Experimental evaluation

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Arguing Safety - A Systematic Approach to Managing Safety Cases

A safety case is a requirement in many safety standards. Explicit safety cases are required for military systems, the off shore oil industry, rail transport and the nuclear industry. Furthermore, equivalent requirements can be found in other industry standards, such as IEC 1508 (which requires a “functional safety assessment”) the EN 292 Machinery Directive (which requires a “technical file”) and DO 178B for avionics (which requires an “accomplishment summary”).

Methodology for Safety Case Development

This paper focuses on the approaches used in safety cases for software based systems. We outline the history of approaches for assuring the safety of software-based systems, the current uptake of safety and assurance cases and the current practice on structured safety cases. Directions for further development are discussed.

Safety and Assurance Cases: Past, Present and Possible Future – an Adelard Perspective

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A Methodology for Safety Case Development

A review of the Project on Diverse Software (PODS), a collaborative software reliability research project, is presented. The purpose of the project was to determine the effect of a number of different software development techniques on software reliability. The main objectives were to evaluate the merits of using diverse software, evaluate the specification language X-SPEX, and compare the productivity and reliability associated with high-level and low-level languages. A secondary objective was to monitor the software development process, with particular reference to the creation and detection of software faults. To achieve these objectives, an experiment was performed which simulated a normal software development process to produce three diverse programs to the same requirement. The requirement was for a reactor over-power protection (trip) system. After careful independent development and testing, the three programs were tested against each other in a special test harness to locate residual faults. The conclusions drawn from this project are discussed.

PODS — A project on diverse software

Experimental and theoretical evidence for the existence of contiguous failure regions in the program input space (blob defects) is provided. For real-time systems where successive input values tend to be similar, blob defects can have a major impact on the software survival time because the failure probability is not constant. For example, with a random walk input sequence, the probability of failure decreases as the time from the last failure increases. It is shown that the key factors affecting the survival time are the input trajectory, the rate of change of the input values, and the surface area of the defect (rather than its volume).

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Peter Bishop

Papers

Methodology for Safety Case Development

Safety and Assurance Cases: Past, Present and Possible Future – an Adelard Perspective

A Methodology for Safety Case Development

PODS — A project on diverse software

The variation of software survival time for different operational input profiles (or why you can wait a long time for a big bug to fail)