Software Safety and Security, Assurance Cases and Model Management

Marsha Chechik, University of Toronto, Canada

From financial services platforms to social networks to vehicle control, software has come to mediate many activities of daily life. Governing bodies and standards organizations have responded to this trend by creating regulations and standards to address issues such as safety, security and privacy. In this environment, the compliance of software development to standards and regulations has emerged as a key requirement; yet,
software compliance is a costly and complex goal to achieve. For example, one estimate of the cost of compliance in the US to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) is $8B per year. Regulatory compliance creates software development complexity in various ways. An organization may have to comply with multiple standards due to multiple jurisdictions or to address different aspects of the software, and these may overlap and conflict with each other. Evidence of compliance must be collected, managed and linked to an assurance case that contains the claims and arguments for compliance. When software evolves, compliance must be reassessed, which can delay the release of changes.
Finally, maintaining families of related software products (product lines) multiplies the effort even further.

Standards, development artifacts and compliance evidence can all be expressed as models. The field of Model Management has emerged to address another software development complexity problem – the proliferation of software models in model driven software development. Model management focuses on a high-level view in which entire models and their relationships (i.e., mappings between models) can be manipulated using specialized operators to achieve useful outcomes.

In this talk, we look at the connection between compliance and modeling to reduce compliance complexity and cost, as well as to facilitate reuse and evolution, with a special focus on automotive software development.

Biography:

Marsha Chechik is Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in 1996. Prof. Chechik’s research interests are in the application of formal methods to improve the quality of software. She has authored numerous papers in formal methods, software specification and verification, computer safety and security and requirements engineering. In 2002-2003, Prof. Chechik was a visiting scientist at Lucent Technologies in Murray Hill, NY and at Imperial College, London UK, and in 2013 – at Stonybrook University. She is a member of IFIP WG 2.9 on Requirements Engineering and an Associate Editor of Journal on Software and Systems Modeling. She is has been an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 2003-2007, 2010-2013. She regularly serves on program committees of international conferences in the areas of software engineering and automated verification. Marsha Chechik is a Program Committee CoChair of the International Conference in Software Engineering (ICSE18). She has been a PC Co-Chair of the 2016 International Conference on Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems (TACAS), the 2016 Working Conference on Verified Software: Theories, Tools, and Experiments (VSTTE16), the 2014 International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), Co-Chair of the 2008 International Conference on Concurrency Theory (CONCUR), PC Co-Chair of the 2008 International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering (CASCON), and PC Co-Chair of the 2009 International Conference on Formal Aspects of Software Engineering (FASE). She is a Member of ACM SIGSOFT and the IEEE Computer Society.

One of the grand challenges of our time is the provision of self-managing adaptive systems. In the extreme, these are required to handle unexpected and unplanned changes that occur at run-time. These unexpected changes can be in any or all of the following: the environment in which the system operates, the capabilities of the system, or in the requirements and goals that the system should achieve. Although ad hoc techniques can be used for specific circumstances, what we need are rigorous, comprehensive, and pragmatic approaches to deal with the challenges that operational run-time change presents.

Formal models, appropriate for the aspects of concern, are essential to support dynamic (semi-) automatic reasoning about change. Furthermore, these models need to be available at runtime and should themselves be amenable to modification. These models@runtime are needed for aspects such as domain modelling and model revision, software configuration and reconfiguration, requirements goals and goal revision and planning and plan revision. The foundation necessary to support these models@runtime is a sound software architecture. This talk will elaborate on this vision and propose a software architecture to support run-time change and adaptation.

Jeff Kramer is a Professor at Imperial College London. He was Head of the Department of Computing from 1999 to 2004, Dean of the Faculty of Engineering from 2006 to 2009 and the Senior Dean from 2009 to 2012.

His research work is primarily concerned with software engineering, focusing on software architecture, behaviour analysis, the use of models in requirements elaboration and architectural approaches to adaptive software systems. He was a principal investigator of research projects that developed the CONIC and DARWIN architectural environments for distributed programming and of associated research into software architectures and their analysis.

Jeff was Program Co-chair of ICSE '99, Chair of the ICSE Steering Committee from 2000 to 2002, and General Co-chair of ICSE 2010 in Cape Town. He was Editor in Chief of IEEE TSE from 2006 to 2009, received the Most Influential Paper Award at ICSE 2003, and was awarded the 2005 ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award and the 2011 ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Service Award. He is co-author of books on Concurrency and on Distributed Systems and Computer Networks, and the author of over 200 journal and conference publications. Jeff is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, a Chartered Engineer, Fellow of the IET, Fellow of the ACM, Fellow of the BCS, Fellow of the City and Guilds of London Institute and a Member of Academia Europaea.

A Formal Contract-Based Design Methodology for CyberPhysical Systems

In cyber-physical systems (CPS) computing, networking and control (typically regarded as the “cyber" part of
the system) are tightly intertwined with mechanical, electrical, thermal, chemical or biological processes (the 
“physical" part). The increasing sophistication and heterogeneity of these systems requires radical changes in the way sense-and- control platforms are designed to regulate them. In this presentation, I introduce a design methodology whereby platform-based design is combined with assume-guarantee contracts to formalize the design process and enable realization of CPS architectures and control software in a hierarchical and compositional manner.

Biography:

Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli holds the Buttner Chair of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has been on the faculty since 1976. He helped founding Cadence and Synopsys, the two leading companies in EDA. He is on the Board of Directors of Cadence, KPIT Technologies, Sonics, Expert Systems, and Cogisen. He is a member of the Investment Committee of Atlante Venture, of the Advisory Board of Innogest, Walden International and Xseed, and of the Executive Committee of the Italian Institute of Technology. He was the President of the Strategic Committee of the Italian Strategic Fund. He consulted for companies such as Intel, HP, Bell Labs, IBM, Samsung, UTC, Kawasaki Steel, Fujitsu, Telecom Italia, Pirelli, GM, BMW, Mercedes, Magneti Marelli, ST Microelectronics, ELT, Unipol and UniCredit.
He earned the IEEE/RSE Maxwell Award for “groundbreaking contributions that have had an exceptional impact on the development of electronics and electrical engineering”, the Kaufmann Award for seminal contributions to EDA, the EDAA lifetime Achievement Award, the IEEE/ACM R. Newton Impact Award, the University of California Distinguished Teaching Award, and the IEEE Graduate Teaching Award for inspirational teaching of graduate students. He is an IEEE and an ACM fellow, a member of the National Academy of Engineering and holds two honorary Doctorates from Aalborg University (Denmark) and KTH (Sweden). He authored over 850 papers, 18 books and 2 patents.