1. Dipartimento di Informatica, Sistemistica e Comunicazione Università degli Studi di Milano – Bicocca Claudio Ferretti - Alberto Leporati{ferretti,leporati}@disco.unimib.it

2. DISCo WS - Milan - June 16, 2009 2 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

3. DISCo WS - Milan - June 16, 2009 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

4. DISCo WS - Milan - June 16, 2009 4 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

5. DISCo WS - Milan - June 16, 2009 5 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

6. DISCo WS - Milan - June 16, 2009 6 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.

7. DISCo WS - Milan - June 16, 2009 7 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

8. DISCo WS - Milan - June 16, 2009 8 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”

9. DISCo WS - Milan - June 16, 2009 9 Activities...

10. DISCo WS - Milan - June 16, 2009 10 Activities...

11. DISCo WS - Milan - June 16, 2009 11 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

12. DISCo WS - Milan - June 16, 2009 12 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”

13. DISCo WS - Milan - June 16, 2009 13 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

14. DISCo WS - Milan - June 16, 2009 14 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…

15. DISCo WS - Milan - June 16, 2009 15 Approach: integration in open source tools Example: a tool developed as a plugin for the Eclipse IDE platform