Jeffrey M. Voas

Free and Open Source Software

In this paper, free and open source software are discussed. Open source is an intellectual property destroyer. Nothing could be worse than this for the software business and the intellectual-property business. Microsoft has an official open source presence on the Web (www.microsoft.com/opensource), and in July 2010, Jean Paoli, the General Manager for Interoperability Strategy at Microsoft, delivered a keynote address at the OReilly Open Source Convention.

Learning Internet-of-Things Security "Hands-On"

What can you glean from using inexpensive, off-the-shelf parts to create Internet of Things (IoT) use cases? As it turns out, a lot. The fast productization of IoT technologies is leaving users vulnerable to security and privacy risks.

PISCES: a tool for predicting software testability

Before a program can fail, a software fault must be executed, that execution must alter the data state, and the incorrect data state must propagate to state that results directly in an incorrect output. This paper describes a tool called PISCES (developed by Reliable Software Technologies Corporation) for predicting the probability that faults in a particular program location will accomplish all three of these steps causing program failure. PISCES is a tool that is used during software verification and validation to predict a programs testability.<<ETX>>

Vetting Mobile Apps

Billions of copies of apps for mobile devices have been purchased in recent years. With this growth, however, comes an increase in the spread of potentially dangerous security vulnerabilities. Because of an apps low cost and high proliferation, the threat of these vulnerabilities could be far greater than that of traditional computers. Thus, purchasing organizations or third-party labs should vet the apps before selling them, and consumers need to understand the risks of apps and the prospects for ensuring their security.

In Trust We Trust

Trust isnt a static property; it must be evaluated perpetually. Can we regain trust? Can the level of trust ever be the same?

Ethics and the Cloud

Cloud computing is an idea thats rapidly evolving. Still, the amount of money and attention devoted to this topic makes it seems sensible to discuss how ethicists view the kinds of changes in computing that are being called the cloud. This department is part of a special issue on cloud computing.

Metamorphic Testing for Cybersecurity

Metamorphic testing (MT) can enhance security testing by providing an alternative to using a test oracle, which is often unavailable or impractical. The authors report how MT detected previously unknown bugs in real-world critical applications such as code obfuscators, giving evidence that software testing requires diverse perspectives to achieve greater cybersecurity.

The Internet of Things: A Reality Check

Today, a new Internet player is rowing more important: things-that is, inanimate objects that can be programmed to communicate, sense, and interact with other things. But will an increasingly fragile ecosystem be able to sustain the amount of power necessary to run all these gadgets? And what other challenges must we overcome to realize a productive and reliable Internet of Things?

Demystifying the Internet of Things

Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) is a distributed network of smart sensors that enables precise control and monitoring of complex processes over arbitrary distances. The concept of Internet of Things ... is that every object in the Internet infrastructure is interconnected into a global dynamic expanding network. In whats called the Internet of Things, sensors actuators embedded in physical objects-from roadways to pacemakers-are linked through wired and wireless networks, often using the same Internet Protocol (IP) that connects the Internet.

Building Caring Healthcare Systems in the Internet of Things

The nature of healthcare and the computational and physical technologies and constraints present a number of challenges to systems designers and implementers. In spite of the challenges, there is a significant market for systems and products to support caregivers in their tasks as the number of people needing assistance grows substantially. In this paper, we present a structured approach for describing Internet of Things (IoT) for healthcare systems. We illustrate the approach for three use cases and discuss relevant quality issues that arise, in particular, the need to consider caring as a requirement.