DISCo WS - Milan - June 3, Dipartimento di Informatica, Sistemistica e Comunicazione Università degli Studi di Milano – Bicocca Claudio Ferretti - Alberto
DISCo WS - Milan - June 3, Research Areas and Approaches Open Source: Source code available from Operating Systems to Applications Computer Security: on Networks, and in Applications OpenIt explores these technological areas And it establishes links to: students, colleagues, companies
DISCo WS - Milan - June 3, 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
DISCo WS - Milan - June 3, Recent Activities: examples LUGs et sim.: Involved in organizing in Bicocca an event of the “Digital Freedom” festival with WikiMedia Italia Between our University and the Open Source world: Working with Sabayon.org (renown Linux distr.): Hosting some of their developing machines Integrating advanced security controls in their packages building process Companies: Joint activity with Sourcesense, a company operating in Open Source with an innovative business model
DISCo WS - Milan - June 3, 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 (e.g.: simulations)
DISCo WS - Milan - June 3, Research Activities: papers Some research papers: A. Leporati, C. Ferretti. Modeling and Analysis of Firewalls by (Tissue-like) P Systems. Brainstorming week on Membr.Sys.-submitted to journal, M. Gutiérrez-Naranjo, A. Leporati. First Steps Towards a CPU Made of Spiking Neural P Systems. International Journal on Computers, Communication and Control, 2009 D. Molteni, C. Ferretti, G. Mauri. Frequency Membrane Systems. Computing and Informatics, A. Leporati, C. Ferretti, G. Mauri, M.J. Pérez- Jiménez, C. Zandron. Complexity aspects of polarizationless membrane systems. Natural Computing, 2008.
DISCo WS - Milan - June 3, Results and Demonstrators Bio-inspired computational models became, e.g.: A Java-based parallel simulator, tested on a computational 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”
DISCo WS - Milan - June 3, Activities...
DISCo WS - Milan - June 3, Activities...
DISCo WS - Milan - June 3, 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: Encrypting instructions Transforming structure
DISCo WS - Milan - June 3, More specific: Open Source We are interested in making good use of source code, especially available in the open source technological arena For instance by mixing static information (source code) and information gathered at runtime (e.g.: syscall tracing) Areas of application: extracting Patterns security Checks smart debugging tools In collaboration with “ESSERE” laboratory
DISCo WS - Milan - June 3, Technology, and Theory, also Tecnology: “Take Linux and modify it”: Loading and executing encrypted executables Theory to Technology: “Take crypto and use it”: Using secret shares to play poker on mobiles Theory: Is violating obfuscation techniques we proposed NP-Complete?
DISCo WS - Milan - June 3, 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… -Example: “LXR” cross referencer on web, extended w.r.t. languages (assembly) and data (pointers), as applicable in the Linux kernel - Or:
DISCo WS - Milan - June 3, Approach: integration in open source tools Security static analysis: integrated as a plugin for the Eclipse IDE