Cla ssical General Systems Theory (GST) is rich with fundamental concepts relating to the explanation of how systems behave and operate. The new concept of object-oriented tech­ niques and methodologies was found to be closely aligned with most of the fundamental theo­ ries of GST. This article presents these alignments and similarities and clearly shows that object-oriented techniques provide a better fit to GST than older design methodologies.

https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1126&context=jiim

Capability-Based Computer Systems

The object-oriented paradigm as an implementation of systems theory in IS

/pdf/reverse-engineering-and-analysis-of-access-control-models-in-12c3fq8mr5.pdf

Reverse-engineering and analysis of access control models in

The complexity of modern software makes it difficult to ship correct programs. Errors can cost money and lives, so developers often use automated software analysis tools to hunt for bugs. By automatically analyzing a program's runtime operation, dynamic analysis tools can find subtle errors that would normally escape the notice of even careful human testers. 
These dynamic analyses are more likely to find errors if they observe the program under numerous and varied runtime situations, so, ideally, users would analyze programs as they run them. Regrettably, these tests cause orders-of-magnitude slowdowns, which few users would tolerate. 
This dissertation presents methods of accelerating dynamic software analyses in order to distribute these trials to users. It begins by observing that the overhead that any individual observes can be lowered by allowing each user to analyze a small, random sample of the program's operations. It then describes a sampling mechanism for dynamic dataflow analyses that only requires access to the virtual memory system. 
Other dynamic software analyses cannot use this technique, so the remainder of this dissertation focuses on novel hardware-based acceleration mechanisms. The first, Testudo, allows faster and more accurate dataflow analysis sampling by storing meta-data in an on-chip cache and stochastically removing these values whenever it overflows. 
Next, a method for performing demand-driven data race detection using existing hardware performance counters is detailed. These counters make inter-cache sharing events visible to software, allowing the data race detector to be enabled only when needed. 
Finally, fine-grained memory monitoring is a crucial for every analysis studied in this work. This dissertation closes by examining a hardware mechanism for allowing unlimited fine-grained watchpoints, which can be used to reduce the overheads of many analyses. 
In total, this dissertation demonstrates that hardware designers can play a role in mitigating software bugs, as many of the acceleration mechanisms explored in this work require hardware support in one form or another. Taken together, these works represent a step forward for accelerating dynamic software analyses and distributing them to end-users.

background

/pdf/hardware-mechanisms-for-distributed-dynamic-software-24gbgppxvu.pdf

Hardware mechanisms for distributed dynamic software analysis

This paper describes a protection scheme for the Java environment. This scheme allows a programmer to specify the protection rights assigned to a class loaded from a remote site with respect to the local files. Protection is expressed in a high-level notation that extends the interface definition of the protected class. Protection is enforced by stubs that are automatically generated from the specification and that are interposed in front of the protected classes, with no possibility of by-passing. The scheme makes extensive use of the ability provided by the Java environment to redefine the class loaders, and relies on the use of “hidden” (i.e. invisible to the programmer) capabilities, a device previously proposed by some of the authors. Preliminary experiments have shown the feasibility of this method. The code of this system will be made freely available.

A Selective Protection Scheme for the Java Environment

With reference to a classic protection system featuring active subjects that reference protected objects, we approach the problem of identifying the objects that each subject can access, and the operations that the subject can carry out on these objects. Password capabilities are a classical solution to this problem. We propose a new form of password capability, called extended password capability (or e-capability, for short). An e-capability can specify any combination of access rights. A subject that holds a given e-capability can generate new e-capabilities for reduced sets of access rights. Furthermore, a subject that created a given object is in a position to revoke the access permissions granted by every e-capability referencing this object, completely or in part. The size of an e-capability is comparable to that of a traditional password capability. The number of passwords that need to be stored in memory permanently is kept to a minimum, and is equal to a single password for each object.

/pdf/access-right-management-by-extended-password-capabilities-da203yfoov.pdf

Capability-Based Computer Systems

Citations

The object-oriented paradigm as an implementation of systems theory in IS

Reverse-engineering and analysis of access control models in

Hardware mechanisms for distributed dynamic software analysis

A Selective Protection Scheme for the Java Environment

Access right management by extended password capabilities

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