Daniel Peters

A Secure System Architecture for Measuring Instruments in Legal Metrology

Embedded systems show the tendency of becoming more and more connected. This fact combined with the trend towards the Internet of Things, from which measuring instruments are not immune (e.g., smart meters), lets one assume that security in measuring instruments will inevitably play an important role soon. Additionally, measuring instruments have adopted general-purpose operating systems to offer the user a broader functionality that is not necessarily restricted towards measurement alone. In this paper, a flexible software system architecture is presented that addresses these challenges within the framework of essential requirements laid down in the Measuring Instruments Directive of the European Union. This system architecture tries to eliminate the risks general-purpose operating systems have by wrapping them, together with dedicated applications, in secure sandboxes, while supervising the communication between the essential parts and the outside world.

GLOUDS: Representing tree-like graphs

Abstract The Graph Level Order Unary Degree Sequence (GLOUDS) is a new succinct data structure for directed graphs that are “tree-like,” in the sense that the number of “additional” edges (w.r.t. a spanning tree) is not too high. The algorithmic idea is to represent a BFS-spanning tree of the graph (consisting of n nodes) with a well known succinct data structure for trees, named LOUDS, and enhance it with additional information that accounts for the non-tree edges. In practical tests, our data structure performs well for graphs containing up to m = 5 n edges, while still having competitive running times for listing adjacent nodes.

Achieving Software Security for Measuring Instruments under Legal Control.

In recent years measuring instruments have adopted general-purpose operating systems to offer the user a broader functionality that is not necessarily restricted towards measurement alone. Additionally the trend to the internet of things from which measuring instruments are not immune, e.g. smart meters and traffic enforcement cameras just to name a few, brings forth security questions. In this paper, a flexible software system architecture that can be constructed out of freely available open source software is presented which addresses these challenges within the framework of essential requirements laid down in the Measuring Instruments Directive of the European Union. The system architecture is based on a modular design assuring correct collaboration between modules by encapsulating them in different virtual machines and supervising their communication.

FLOUDS: A Succinct File System Structure.

To spot malicious manipulation, remote attestation and maintenance for devices that are under legal control is very important. One example are measuring instruments, where the manufacturer and the market surveillance want to check if system integrity is preserved. In Europe, legal requirements state that a software identifier needs to be supplied/output by the device, which is often just a checksum over the files that are considered to be legally relevant for the measuring purpose. As measuring instruments and also other legally monitored devices are often small embedded systems, the need for a fast algorithm arises that creates a small file system list containing as much information as possible. In this paper, a new file system structure called FLOUDS is explained that fulfills these requirements. The FLOUDS uses theoretical optimal space to represent the file system structure, while it, nevertheless, enables fast file searches by names and also properties. For example, all files of a specific file type, e.g., pictures, movies, executables, etc., can be listed in O(p lg n) time, where p is the number of files of the specific file type searched for, and, where n represents the total number of file types in the system.

A Practical Succinct Data Structure for Tree-Like Graphs

We present a new succinct data structure for graphs that are “tree-like,” in the sense that the number of “additional” edges (w.r.t. a spanning tree) is not too high. Our algorithmic idea is to represent a BFS-spanning tree of the graph with a succinct data structure for trees, and enhance it with additional information that accounts for the non-tree edges. In practical tests, our data structure performs well for graphs containing up to 10% of non-tree edges, reducing the space of a pointer-based representation by a factor of ≈20, while increasing the worst-case running times for the operations by roughly the same factor.

A secure software framework for Measuring Instruments in legal metrology

Measuring instruments tend to be powerful devices, that have adopted general-purpose operating systems to offer the user a broader functionality that is not necessarily restricted towards measurement alone. In this paper, a flexible software system architecture that can be constructed out of freely available open source software is presented which addresses these challenges within the framework of essential requirements laid down in the Measuring Instruments Directive of the European Union. This system architecture tries to eliminate the risks general-purpose operating systems have by wrapping them, together with dedicated applications, in secure sandboxes while supervising the communication between the essential parts and the outside world.