Fabio Fioravanti

Quality of service in wireless networks

In this paper we revise some of the most relevant aspects concerning the quality of service in wireless networks, providing, along the research issues we are currently pursuing, both the state-of-the-art and our recent achievements. More specifically, first of all we focus on network survivability, that is the ability of the network of maintaining functionality as a consequence of a component failure. Then, we turn our attention on data access and network services in a distributed environment. Finally, we analyze a basic network optimization task, that is routing design in wireless ATM networks.

Certifying performance of cooperative services in a digital government framework

One of the major challenges in the digital government arena is the capability of providing good quality services to citizens. The critical issue is that for a given service a citizen usually interacts with a single provider even if service supply and management requires coordination and cooperation among many autonomous organizations. This means that a single user request spreads in the underlying distributed information system and activates a number of information flows among organizations involved, with various roles and responsibility, in service provision. A main issue is how events in the distributed system can be objectively monitored so that the service provider can (i) understand and manage problems in the overall service supply process and (ii) certify quality of provided service. What makes this scenario especially complex is that, beyond technical aspects, for any solution to be successful, it has to comply with requirements of independence and autonomy of the various organizations involved. In this paper we discuss how we tackled and solved this issue in real-world systems defined for the Italian public administration and argue that our solution can provide a reference architecture to deal with this kind of problem.

THE ITALIAN ELECTRONIC IDENTITY CARD: OVERALL ARCHITECTURE AND IT INFRASTRUCTURE

In this paper we describe the overall process of deployment of the Italian Electronic Identity Card: the way it is issued, services it is used for, organizations involved in the process, and the Information Technology (IT) infrastructure enabling the effective management of the whole process while ensuring the mandatory security functions. Organizational complexity lies in the distribution of responsibilities for the management of Personal Data Registries (on which identity of people is based) which is an institutional duty of the more than 8000 Italian municipalities, and the need of keeping a centralized control on all processes dealing with identity of people as prescribed by laws and for national security and police purposes. Technical complexity stems from the need of efficiently supporting this distribution of responsibilities while ensuring, at the same time, interoperability of IT-based systems independent of technical choices of the organizations involved, and fulfilment of privacy constraints. The IT architecture defined for this purpose features a clear separation between security services, provided at an infrastructure level, and application services, exposed on the Internet as Web Services. This approach has allowed to easily design and implement secure interoperability, since - notwithstanding the huge variety of IT solutions deployed all over the Italian Municipalities to manage Personal Data Registries - existing application services have not required major changes to be able to interoperate.

Automatic Proofs of Protocols via Program Transformation

We propose a method for the specification and the automated verification of temporal properties of protocols which regulate the activities of multiagent systems. The set of states of those systems may be infinite so that, in general, the verification of a property of a multiagent system cannot be performed by an exhaustive inspection. We specify a given multiagent system by means of a constraint logic program P with locally stratified negation, and we specify a given temporal property to be verified by means of an atomic formula A. In order to verify that the given temporal property holds, we transform the program P into an equivalent program T such that the fact A ← belongs to T. Our transformation method consists of a set of rules and an automatic strategy that guides the application of the rules. Our method is sound for verifying properties of protocols that are expressible in the CTL logic [5]. Although our method is incomplete for proving properties of infinite state systems, it is able to verify important properties of several protocols which are used in practice.

A Specification for Security Services on Computational Grids

In this paper we present a computational infrastructure, the Security Backbone, which is able to satisfy security requirements arising from resource sharing and services interoperability in Grid-like environments, without having to rely on a Public-Key Infrastructure (PKI). Motivation of our approach is rooted in the well-known difficulties encountered to show that interoperability of PKIs is effective or efficient in real-world environments.