Son T. Vuong

Semiautomatic implementation of protocols using an Estelle-C compiler

The basic ideas underlying an Estelle-C compiler, which accepts an Estelle protocol specification and produces a protocol implementation in C, are presented. The implementation of the ISO (International Organization for Standardization) class-2 transparent protocol, using the semiautomatic approach, is discussed. A manual implementation of the protocol is performed and compared to the semiautomatic implementation. The semiautomatic approach to protocol implementation offers several advantages over the conventional manual one, including correctness and modularity in protocol implementation code, conformance to the specification, and reduction in implementation time. Finally, ongoing development of a new Estelle-C compiler is presented. >

A remotely controlled Bluetooth enabled environment

Ad-hoc networks using Bluetooth enabled devices have piqued the interest of the networking community. Network developers are looking into different means of remotely controlling the devices comprising such networks, so as to have the flexibility to change various device parameters without actually being present near them. We present a method of remotely controlling devices in a Bluetooth enabled environment in the home or office from any part of the world via the Internet. A Web page applet programmed in Java can be accessed from any Java-enabled browser connected to the Internet and is used to control parameters of remote Bluetooth devices. It is also used to display the current state of the Bluetooth devices. A novel application of using Bluetooth devices for remote control is that a passive electronic device can be given processing power simply by connecting a Bluetooth chip to it. Any passive device in the Bluetooth enabled scatternet can have processed data send to it by the program resident in the Web server. The paper addresses issues related to internetworking such networks to form scatternets and presents a scatternet formation algorithm to solve the problem of connecting all the Bluetooth enabled devices in any home or office environment.

Introduction to algebraic specifications based on the language ACT ONE

Abstract The tutorial will give an introduction to algebraic methods for system specifications. It will explain the basic mathematical theory. But the main emphasis will remain on the exposition of the methodological principles by which specifications are constructed. The concepts will be introduced on the basis of the specification language ACT ONE. We will demonstate the use of ACT ONE with an example from the OSI area.

APHIDS: A Mobile Agent-Based Programmable Hybrid Intrusion Detection System

Intrusion detection systems are quickly becoming a standard requirement in building a network security infrastructure. Although many established techniques and commercial products exist, their effectiveness leaves room for improvement. We propose an intrusion detection system architecture which takes advantage of the mobile agent paradigm to implement a system capable of efficient and flexible distribution of analysis and monitoring tasks, as well as integration of existing detection techniques. Our architecture defines a high-level application specific scripting language to specify the interaction between monitoring agents and analysis agents.

Enabling low bit-rate and reliable video surveillance over practical wireless sensor network

With the rapid development of hardware and embedded systems, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are being developed for surveillance applications. While meriting more in-depth research and development, deploying a practical WSN for surveillance is challenging due to the limited power and bandwidth of the battery-operated sensor nodes. In this paper, we first propose an energy-efficient image transportation strategy through motion detection. In case of data delivery over long distance, this paper further investigates the use of cooperative communications to design a reliable image transmission scheme over WSN, and demonstrates its effectiveness in improving network reliability in wireless multimedia sensor networks.

An efficient clustered architecture for P2P networks

Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing offers many attractive features, such as self-organization, load-balancing, availability, fault tolerance, and anonymity. However, it also faces some serious challenges. In this paper, we propose an efficient clustered super-peer P2P architecture (ECSP) to overcome the scalability and efficiency problems of existing unstructured P2P system. With ECSP, peers are grouped into clusters according to their topological proximity, and super-peers are selected from regular peers to act as cluster leaders and service providers. These super-peers are also connected to each other, forming a backbone overlay network operating as a distinct, yet integrated, application. To maintain the dynamically adaptive overlay network and to manage the routing on it, we propose an application level broadcasting protocol: Efa. Applying only a small amount of information about the topology of a network, Efa is as simple as flooding, a conventional method used in unstructured P2P systems. By eliminating many duplicated messages, Efa is much more efficient and scalable than flooding, and furthermore, it is completely decentralized and self-organized. Our experimental results prove that ESCP architecture, combined with the super-peer backbone protocol, can generate impressive levels of performance and scalability.

Random Forest Classification for Detecting Android Malware

Internet connected smartphone devices play a crucial role in the application domain of Internet of Things. These devices are being widely used for day-to-day activities such as remotely controlling lighting and heating at homes, paying for parking, and recently for paying for goods using saved credit card information using Near Field Communication (NFC). Android is the most popular smartphone platform today. It is also the choice of malware authors to obtain secure and private data. In this paper we exclusively apply the machine learning ensemble learning algorithm Random Forest supervised classifier on an Android feature dataset of 48919 points of 42 features each. Our goal was to measure the accuracy of Random Forest in classifying Android application behavior to classify applications as malicious or benign. Moreover, we wanted to focus on detection accuracy as the free parameters of the Random Forest algorithm such as the number of trees, depth of each tree and number of random features selected are varied. Our experimental results based on 5-fold cross validation of our dataset shows that Random Forest performs very well with an accuracy of over 99 percent in general, an optimal Out-Of-Bag (OOB) error rate [3] of 0.0002 for forests with 40 trees or more, and a root mean squared error of 0.0171 for 160 trees.

Reachability analysis of protocols with FIFO channels

In a complete protocol design process, it is often important to validate the protocol for general correctness properties such as boundedness, deadlock absence, and well-formedness. However, for any general protocol modeled as a number of communicating finite state machines with unbounded FIFO channels, the above properties are known to be undecidable [Brand81a, Brand80a]. In this paper we demonstrate the decidability of those properties for a class of protocols, called well-ordered protocols. We introduce an algorithm for constructing a finite reachability tree for any given protocol with FIFO channels and show that by using this reachability tree, one can decide whether any given protocol is well-ordered, and if it is well-ordered whether it has an unbounded channel, a state deadlock, or an unspecified reception.

On tools supporting the use of formal description techniques in protocol development

Abstract FDT tools support protocol development by making certain activities feasible, easier to be performed, more reliable, and faster. This paper discusses the desirable properties of FDT tools and classifies them according to the different stages of the protocol development cycle. An assessment of the tools available so far and projections (or suggestions) of the tools to come are given. A list of the tools that have appeared since the mid 1980s is also included.

A novel approach to protocol test sequence generation

A novel approach for test sequence generation based on the constraints satisfaction problem (CSP) in artificial intelligence is proposed. The proposed method constructs a unique test sequence for the entire finite state machine (FSM) by incrementally generating a set of test subsequences which represent the constraints imposed on the overall structure of the FSM. The resulting test sequence not only has a fault coverage which is at least as good as that provided by current methods, but it also has a better worst-case upper bound on its length. The method also lends itself naturally on both test result analysis and fault coverage measurement.<<ETX>>