Research on Dependability and Security
- Dr. Panagiotis Katsaros, Lecturer
- Dr. Lefteris Angelis, Assistant Professor
- collaboration with other academic staff members
Research on Dependability and Security
Dependable Distributed Systems
(research started in 2003):
Dependable system is a system that meets its expected behavior in
all circumstances (performance, availability, reliability and system’s
correctness properties like for example safety, atomicity and
consistency).
Dependability & Security are two interrelated problems
(new journal: IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing)
- a security attack is possible to result in a system’s failure to meet
its expected behavior
example: recent incident in VODAFONE – Greece, where an insider
conversation privacy attack caused an AXE-10 system failure in
dispatching SMS messages
- correctness property violation like for example an atomicity
violation design flaw results in a non secure system
Research on Dependability and Security
Areas of interest:
 quantitative evaluation and trade-offs between
dependability attributes (performance, availability,
reliability etc) in distributed systems
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formal methods in the analysis of safety, security and
fault tolerance
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simulation
stochastic optimization
model checking (SPIN, Colored Petri Nets, AVISPA)
theorem proving (Coq)
issues related to access control, information flow
control, concurrency control, atomicity and recovery
Research on Dependability and Security
Research staff and students:
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2
2
1
7
academic staff members
PhD students
M.Sc. student (thesis)
undergraduate students (thesis)
Research & Development Projects:
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EU INTERREG IIIC South programme (MedWet CODDE)
ARCHIMIDES II – Greek Ministry of Education (2 projects)
Collaboration:
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Un. of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece
Athens Un. of Economics and Business, Athens, Greece
CardiSoft, Thessaloniki, Greece
Research on Dependability and Security
Recent publications – ongoing research:
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performance & availability trade-off for different transaction
processing alternatives (ACID Sim Tools – ready prototype)
ACID properties costs simulation for different Transaction Processing
Models and their parameters (protocols for concurrency control,
distributed atomic commit, recovery, deadlock handling and replication)
Research on Dependability and Security
Recent publications – ongoing research:
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fault tolerance performance & effectiveness trade-off (replication
based or message logging with/without checkpointing)
an approach to compare different fault tolerance mechanisms, choose the
most effective one and tune its parameters (e.g. checkpoint intervals,
number of replicas) such as to achieve the required response times at the
lowest possible fault tolerance cost
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model checking various atomicity properties (in payment
transactions) by the use of Colored Petri Nets
an approach that can be extended to model checking many other
correctness properties in component software models and in models of
systems with timing constraints (schedulability analysis)
Research on Dependability and Security
Recent publications – ongoing research:
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new interlocking control algorithm based on the use of the socalled Distributed Signal Boxes, for safety-critical systems (to be
published)
(correctness properties proved for the Athens underground railway
system by the SPIN model checker)
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new approach for the design of access control in distributed
systems, such as to prevent sensitive information leakage
formal analysis of smart card security – Public Key Infrastructures
(ongoing work)
More info:
http://delab.csd.auth.gr/~katsaros/