Dipartimento di Informatica, Sistemistica e Comunicazione
Università degli Studi di Milano – Bicocca
Claudio Ferretti - Alberto Leporati
{ferretti,leporati}@disco.unimib.it
Research Areas and Approaches
Open Source:
Source code available ...
... from Operating Systems to Applications
Computer Security:
on Networks, and in Applications
The Lab explores these (then new) technological
areas
It established links to: students, professors,
companies
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Activities...
...with students:
Theses (around 20 per year)
“LUGs”
...with our University:
Making open source tools available in shared
laboratories
Training skilled technicians
...with Companies
Stages
Joint research
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Research Activities: PhD students
A. Gallini:
Computational and Programming Models for
Molecular-scale devices based machines
S. Orciari:
Integration of 3G and wireless LAN
architectures: a perspective on authentication
S. Felloni:
Decoherence, inaccuracy and errors in quantum
information processing
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Theoretical backgrounds,
and technological interests
Faculty staff in OpenIt also do research in the
BIMIB Lab
Research topics are strongly influenced by such
scientific backgrounds (theoretical models and
their properties)
In OpenIt, we link models to applications
Also, OpenIt supports technical developments
required by researches in BIMIB
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Research Activities: papers
Some research papers:
• D. Molteni, C. Ferretti, G. Mauri. Frequency
Membrane Systems. Computing and Informatics,
2008.
• A. Leporati, C. Ferretti, G. Mauri, M.J. Pérez-Jiménez,
C. Zandron. Complexity aspects of polarizationless
membrane systems. Natural Computing, 2008.
• A. Leporati, S. Felloni. Three “Quantum” algorithms to
solve 3-SAT. Theoretical Computer Science, 2007.
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About funding and grants
ERC Starting Grant proposal:
“Theoretical Foundations of Computer
and Network Security”
Topic: the computational model called “membrane
systems” can be used to formalize highly
structured computer networks, which require the
definition of provably secure firewall rules
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Results and Demonstrators
Bio-inspired computational models became:
A Java-based parallel simulator,
tested on a small cluster
An adaptive and fault-tolerant
(simulated) “Bio-Floor”: Someone on
the floor (yellow dot) moving up, and
tiles light up anticipating his
movement
Further computational models:
An obfuscating processor, based on “register
machines”
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Activities...
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Activities...
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More specific: Security
“Obfuscating” network traffic:
a distributed system mixing false and real
traffic to defeat its analisys
Assisted generation of firewalls' ACLs:
from simple checking to automatic building
with the help from traffic samples
On these topics: ongoing collaboration with
“TELCO” laboratory
Obfuscating software:
On these topics: ongoing collaboration with
“ESSERE” laboratory
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More specific: Open Source
We are interested in making good use of source
code, especially available in the open source
technological arena
A whole growing area is that of fruitfully mixing
static information (source code) and information
gathered at runtime (e.g.: syscall tracing)
Expected areas of application:
extracting Patterns
security Checks
smart debugging tools
In collaboration with “ESSERE”
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Theory, also
About extracting Patterns:
• Tracing the execution of a given program, in
addition to the static analysis of the source code,
helps in recognizing programming patterns in that
software product
• the problem opens interesting theoretical issues,
for example concerning the computational
complexity of this pattern extraction , when
patterns are modeled as graphs
Security checks on applications:
• Adding runtime informations to static analysis helps
in reducing false positives, or in defining heuristics
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Approach: integration in
open source tools
Given the availability of (open) source code:
whenever possible we develop tools as extensions
to existing projects, or as plugins for them…
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Approach: integration in
open source tools
Example: a tool developed as a plugin for the Eclipse IDE platform
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