Contextual local analysis in the design of distributed systems
Compositional Reachability Analysis is a popular technique for studying behaviour of finite-state distributed systems. The technique is applied by a repetition oflocal analyses, the basic steps of which are to construct and examine the behaviour of subsystems. In most cases, behaviour of the subsystem is constrained by its environment (calledcontext) formed by neighbouring components. These behaviour constraints are normally not considered when using local analysis in conventional techniques of compositional reachability analysis. As a result, many execution paths derived in the local analysis may not be actually traversed by the subsystem. These paths are made impossible to traverse by the constraints. The paths are unnecessary for understanding the subsystem behaviour and their removal greatly simplifies the local analysis. In this paper, we describe an elegant technique, calledcontextual local analysis, to include these behaviour constraints in conventional local analysis. The technique can alleviate dramatically the state explosion problem encountered in local analysis. It also facilitates early detection of anomalous behaviour of a distributed system at its design stage. The technique works by composing an interface process with the subsystem being examined. That interface process is so chosen that it captures behaviour constraints enforced by the environment while its composition with the subsystem does not affect the global system behaviour. This interface process can be automatically derived using a simple algorithm. The contextual local analysis technique results in a simplified labelled transition system which can be used as a substitute for the original subsystem in the construction of the global system behaviour. The contextual local analysis technique is illustrated with a clients/server example implementing a round-robin protocol.

title: A Framework for Distributed Object-Oriented Testing
abstract: Distributed programming and object-oriented programming are two popular programming paradigms. The former is driven by advances in networking technology whereas the latter provides vigorous software principles needed in developing complex software systems. While more and more distributed object-oriented software has appeared, not much work exists on the testing of these systems in an integrated manner. Instead, the distributed and object features have been tested separately. In this paper, we propose an integrated framework known as DOOT for incremental testing of distributed object-oriented software systems. It combines various testing techniques to provide comprehensive test coverage at four levels — class testing, intra-cluster testing, inter-cluster testing and system testing. Each level uses a specific fault model, test strategy and test case generation that build on the previous test level to reduce the overall test effort. They are designed to handle the distinct requirements of the two paradigms at each level. Moreover, a reduction algorithm for testing the inherited class is also included in the framework. The approach is illustrated using a real life example of a conferencing system.

title: Data-driven methodology to extending workflows to e-services over the Internet
abstract: E-services refer to the services offered over the Internet. The globalization of economy accelerates the provision of e-services across organizations. Instead of being built from scratch, e-services are mostly extended from existing internal workflows or information systems. In this paper, we examine the requirements of extending a workflow to the provision of e-services, in order to fulfill predefined business processes and data requirements. We also discuss the support of exception handling and asynchronous events across organizational boundaries, through an event publish-and-subscribe mechanism. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach with the E-ADOME extension layer of our ADOME-WFMS, further illustrated with a system integration example. Our event-driven execution model provides a unified framework for both synchronous execution of workflow and asynchronous handling of events and exceptions. Illustrations are also given on the provision of such e-services over the infrastructure of Web services and Enterprise JavaBeans.

title: A Three-Layer Framework for Cross-Organizational e-Contract Enactment
abstract: In an e-commerce environment, contracts are important for attaining business process interoperability and enforcing their proper enactment.  In the business layer, e-contracts are defined through analyzing the contract clauses to business rules and business entities. In the structural layer, requirements for the E-contract enactment workflow are elucidated through requirement analysis to cover both static and dynamic aspects. In the implementation layer, workflows and cross-organizational interoperating interfaces are implemented using contemporary Enterprise Java Bean and Web services. In this paper, we present the methodology and process for engineering the functional aspects of e-contracts from high-level business-view down to implementation layer based on this framework, illustrated with an investment example. The framework allows an e-contract to be seamlessly defined and enacted. The framework is modeled in UML.

title: A three-layer architecture for e-contract enforcement in an e-service environment
abstract: In an e-service environment, contracts are important for attaining business process interoperability and enforcing their proper enactment.  In the document layer, contracts are composed of different types of clauses. In the business layer, e-contract enforcement activities are defined through the realization of contract clauses as business rules in event-condition-action (ECA) form. In the implementation layer, cross-organizational e-contract enforcement interfaces are implemented with contemporary Enterprise Java Bean and Web services. We present a methodology for the engineering of e-contracts enforcement from a high-level document-view down to the implementation layer based on this architecture, using a supply-chain example. As a result, e-contracts can be seamlessly defined and enforced. Conceptual models of various layers are given in the Unified Modeling Language (UML).

title: Exploiting automatic analysis of e-commerce protocols
abstract: While e-commerce continuously grows prosperous, some advantages e-commerce applications claimed haven't really been gained. More seriously, the availability and reliability of these systems are particularly hard to obtain. The e-commerce protocols, as the core of e-commerce applications, ask for new development approach and techniques to be introduced for their highly reliable and safe design and implementation. This paper describes research on synthesis of extended UML formalism and formal verification techniques for automatic development of e-commerce protocols. In this paper, we refine AUML protocol diagrams for visual modeling, and develop algorithm and rules to translate visually modeled e-commerce protocols into formal models that are then validated using model checking. This approach is applied to the design of an e-commerce protocol, NetBill, as example. Our objective is to create tools that enable designers to automatically develop available and reliable e-commerce protocols.

title: Efficient video similarity measurement and search
abstract: We consider the use of meta-data and/or video-domain methods to detect similar videos on the Web. Meta-data is extracted from the textual and hyperlink information associated with each video clip. In the video domain, we apply an efficient similarity detection algorithm called video signature. The idea is to form a signature for each clip by selecting a small number of its frames that are most similar to a set of random seed images. We then apply a statistical pruning algorithm to allow fast detection on very large databases. Using a small ground-truth set, we achieve 90% recall and 95% precision using only 8% of the total number of operations required without pruning. For a database of around 46,000 video clips crawled from the Web, the video signature technique significantly outperforms meta-data in precision and recall. We show that even better performance can be achieved by combining them together. Based on our measurements, each video clip in our database has, on average, 1.53 similar copies.

title: Video similarity detection with video signature clustering
abstract: The proliferation of video content on the Web makes similarity detection an indispensable tool in Web data management, searching, and navigation. We have previously proposed a compact representation of video clips, called video signature, for retrieving similar video clips in large databases. In this paper, we propose a new signature clustering algorithm to further improve retrieval performance. The algorithm treats all the signatures as an abstract threshold graph, where the threshold is determined based on local data statistics. Similar clusters are identified as highly connected regions in the graph. This algorithm outperforms simple thresholding and hierarchical clustering techniques in identifying a set of manually-determined similar clusters from a dataset of 46,356 Web video clips. At 95% precision, our algorithm attains 85% recall while simple thresholding and complete-link hierarchical scheme attain 67% and 75% recall respectively. Applying our algorithm to the entire dataset, 6,900 similar clusters are identified, with an average cluster size of 2.81 video clips. The distribution of cluster sizes follows a power-law distribution, which has been shown to describe many Web phenomena.

title: Decomposing the queue length distribution of processor-sharing models into queue lengths of permanent customer queues
abstract: We obtain a decomposition result for the steady state queue length distribution in egalitarian processor-sharing (PS) models. In particular, for multi-class egalitarian PS queues, we show that the marginal queue length distribution for each class equals the queue length distribution of an equivalent single class PS model with a random number of permanent customers. Similarly, the mean sojourn time (conditioned on the initial service requirement) for each class can be obtained by conditioning on the number of permanent customers. The decomposition result implies linear relations between the marginal queue length probabilities, which also hold for other PS models such as the egalitarian PS models with state-dependent system capacity that only depends on the total number of customers in the system. Based on the exact decomposition result for egalitarian PS queues, we propose a similar decomposition for discriminatory processor-sharing (DPS) models, and numerically show that the approximation is accurate for moderate differences in service weights.

title: Automatic analysis of firewall and network intrusion detection system configurations
abstract: Given a network that deploys multiple firewalls and network intrusion detection systems (NIDSs), ensuring that these security components are correctly configured is a challenging problem. Although models have been developed to reason independently about the effectiveness of firewalls and NIDSs, there is no common framework to analyze their interaction. This paper presents an integrated, constraint-based approach for modeling and reasoning about these configurations. Our approach considers the dependencies among the two types of components, and can reason automatically about their combined behavior. We have developed a tool for the specification and verification of networks that include multiple firewalls and NIDSs, based on this approach. This tool can also be used to automatically generate NIDS configurations that are optimal relative to a given cost function.

title: Dependable Intrusion Tolerance: technology demo
abstract: The Dependable Intrusion Tolerance (DIT) architecture is a flexible, adaptive, and intrusion-tolerant server design. We briefly discuss its prototype implementation and validation, and demonstrate how it resists sample attacks.