IFIP International Conference Research Articles

Advances in test generation for testing software and systems

Among the software quality assurance techniques, testing stands out as one of the most frequently used techniques in practice. Consequently, testing is also widely studied in research. An important aspect in testing that receives much attention is the problem of automated test generation. This introductory paper summarizes the papers selected from the 25th IFIP International Conference on Testing Software and Systems (ICTSS 2013), which all deal with this topic. The field is briefly introduced by pointing out to some of the existing survey articles and relating the selected papers in this issue to each other and to the known body of knowledge.

Distributed applications and interoperable systems (Extended papers from DAIS’10)

This special issue contains selected papers from the 10th IFIP International Conference on Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems (DAIS ’10), held in Amsterdam in the Netherlands on June 7–9 in 2010. For the 10th anniversary, the conference was organized for the first time in cooperation with ACM SIGSOFT and ACM SIGAPP. Furthermore, the program co-chairs Frank Eliassen and Rüdiger Kapitza initiated this special issue. The presented works address various aspects of distributed applications, including their design, implementation and operation, the supporting middleware, appropriate software engineering methodologies and tools. The selection of papers was compiled by inviting 8 out of the 17 full conference papers that were originally presented at the conference. In a three-stage review process 5 out of the 8 papers were finally accepted for this special issue. Walraven et al. 1 propose a coordination architecture for flexible and policy-driven composition of cross-organizational features in distributed service systems. The underlying approach of this architecture is to specify the features and their composition at a higher level that abstracts the internal implementation mechanisms of the organizations involved. Felber et al. 2 present a collaborative search companion system, CoFeed, that collects user search queries and that considers feedback to build user-centric and document-centric profiling information. Over time, the system constructs ranked collections of elements that maintain the required information diversity and enhance the user search experience by presenting additional results tailored to the user's interest space. Zaplata et al. 3 propose a concept for the development of future context-aware applications based on the novel approach of structured context prediction. As a framework, this approach allows integration of domain-specific knowledge and facilitates the application, combination and implementation of suitable prediction methods. Romero et al. 4 focus on home environments and propose a middleware solution, called DigiHome, that applies the Service Component Architecture (SCA) component model to integrate data and events generated by heterogeneous devices in such environments. DigiHome exploits the extensibility of SCA to incorporate the representational state transfer architectural style and, in this way, leverages on the integration of multiscale systems of systems (from wireless sensor networks to the Internet). Additionally, the platform applies complex event processing technology that detects application-specific situations. Careton et al. 5 extend the ambient-oriented programming paradigm to program radio frequency identification (RFID) applications. They considered RFID tags as intermittently connected mutable proxy objects hosted on mobile-distributed computing devices and detail their prototype implementation. We thank the editors of Software – Practice and Experience for hosting this special issue, the authors for their excellent work of extending and improving their original conference publications and especially the DAIS program committee members who served for the special issue for taking the time and providing high value feedback during the three review rounds.

Introduction: advances in E-business engineering

E-business is one of the most exciting and challenging research areas [9, 10, 14]. Today, not only large companies, but also medium or small-sized companies are learning that e-business is a required component of doing business. E-business has rapidly evolved in the last decade and this trend will continue. In this rapid process, a variety of e-business engineering methods and techniques have been developed [28]. There are many research issues needed to be addressed. As a result, there is a growing demand for insights into challenges, issues, and solutions related to the design, implementation, and management of e-business systems. To respond to the needs from both academic researchers and practitioners for communicating research results on e-business engineering and related topics, a number of related conferences organized by the IFIP TC8 WG8.9, IEEE SMC Society Technical Committee on Enterprise Information Systems, and other major research institutions have been held in the past years. Such conferences include IFIP International Conference on Research and Practical Issues of Enterprise Information Systems (Confenis), IEEE SMC International Conference Special Session on Enterprise Information Systems, International Forum of Information Systems Frontiers (IFISF), International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Engineering, GCIS, and WCSE [19]. These conferences plus workshops organized by IFIP and IEEE have provided an international forum for researchers in academia and industry to present their most recent findings in e-business engineering. This special issue of Information Technology and Management presents expanded versions of 20 papers from the above-mentioned conferences held recently, authored by scholars from Austria, China, Japan, Russia, UK, and US. The purpose of this special issue is to report on the state-of-the-art of, and emerging trends in, research and practice in e-business engineering. To prepare for this issue, all authors were asked to respond to at least two rounds of peer review. Each paper emphasizes the importance of e-business engineering from a unique perspective. IoT is an emerging Internet-based industrial information architecture that can be employed to facilitate information flow in global supply chain networks [36]. An effective strategy of IoT can help firms to grasp the emerging opportunities from the IoT and improve competitive advantages. In the paper entitled ‘‘Towards a theoretical framework of strategic decision, supporting capability and information sharing under the context of Internet of Things’’, Li et al. of Shanghai Jiaotong University provide a theoretical framework which classifies IoT strategies into four archetypes from two dimensions of managers’ strategic intent and industrial driving force, and propose that market-based S. Xu Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China

Introduction: Advances in E-business engineering

E-business is more than just e-commerce. It is one of the most challenging areas for industry and research communities. E-business has evolved from business-to-business, business-to-customer, customer-to-business, customer-tocustomer, and business-to-government systems to the integrated and collaborative business services among various information systems and e-marketplaces. In this evolving process, integrated e-business systems and their related supporting platforms have to be rapidly designed and developed in order to meet different requirements. A variety of e-business engineering paradigms and technologies have been developed to tackle these challenges. There are many research issues needed to be addressed. These issues include heterogeneous services integration, disparate e-business functions collaboration, semantic level e-business messaging, etc. Today, not only large companies, but also medium or small-sized companies are learning that e-business is a required component of doing business. As a result, there is a growing demand for insights into challenges, issues, and solutions related to the design, implementation, and management of e-business systems. To respond to the market needs from both academic researchers and practitioners, and to communicate research results on e-business engineering, a number of related conferences organized by the IFIP TC8 WG8.9, IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on E-Commerce, and IEEE SMC Society Technical Committee on Enterprise Information Systems have been held in the past years. Such conferences include IEEE International Conference on e-Business Engineering, IFIP International Conference on Research and Practical Issues of Enterprise Information Systems (Confenis), IEEE SMC International Conference Special Session on Enterprise Information Systems, GCIS, and WCSE. These conferences plus workshops have provided an international forum for researchers in academia and industry to present their most recent findings in e-business engineering. This special issue of Information Technology and Management presents expanded versions of 12 papers from the above-mentioned conferences held recently. The purpose of this special issue is to report on the state-of-the-art of, and emerging trends in, research and practice in e-business engineering. To prepare for this issue, all authors were asked to respond to two rounds of peer review. Each paper emphasizes the importance of e-business engineering from a unique perspective. In the paper by Academician Shoubo Xu of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, a new concept of management is proposed. The author indicates that ‘‘to manage’’ means to lead, to plan, to organize and to control; and ‘‘to reason’’ means to understand the law of the development of objects being managed. This new concept is an integration of the two elements of ‘‘managing’’ and ‘‘reasoning’’. As such, management is to study the contradictory relationship between ‘‘managing’’ and ‘‘reasoning’’, and consider how such a relationship develops and changes. The paper discusses its broad applications including information industry such as e-business. Qian, Jin and Fang of the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in their paper entitled ‘‘Heuristic algorithms for effective broker deployment’’, proposes a model for the broker deployment problem, and presents two heuristic algorithms for the multi-object optimization of broker deployment. Experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms. L. Li (&) Department of Information Technology and Decision Sciences, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA 23529, USA e-mail: lli@odu.edu

Guest Editorial: Special Issue on EUC 2007

Embedded and ubiquitous computing is an exciting new paradigm that provides computing and communication services all the time and everywhere. Its systems are now affecting every aspect of our life to the point that they are hidden inside various appliances. This emergence is a natural outcome of research and technological advances in embedded systems, pervasive computing and communications, wireless networks, mobile computing, distributed computing and agent technologies, etc. This special issue has collected best papers presented in the 2007 IFIP International Conference on Embedded and Ubiquitous Computing (EUC 2007), held in Taipei, Taiwan, ROC. These papers present state of the art in the areas of real-time and embedded software, power-aware hardware management, network security, embedded compiler techniques, mobility and security in advanced wireless networks, and data crawling. Best papers in the EUC 2007 conference were invited for submission. All the invited papers had undergone an intensive review process. The Editor-in-Chief agreed with our recommendation of the acceptance of eleven high quality papers. The first four papers focus on software techniques in embedded and ubiquitous systems. The first paper, entitled “Task Scheduling for Context Minimization in Dynamically Reconfigurable Platforms”, by Nei-Chiung Perng et al. describes a real-time approach to reducing the number of FPGA configuration contexts in dynamic reconfigurable systems. The second paper, entitled “Real-Time Embedded Software Design for Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems” by Pao-Ann Hsiung et al., describes a component-based software architecture that supports automatic synthesis and verification, aiming at high software design productivity. The third paper, entitled “SIGMA system: A Multi-OS Environment for Embedded Systems”, by Wataru Kanda et al., introduces a virtualization technique to support multiple operating systems for multi-processor embedded architectures. The fourth paper, entitled “Compiling for Reduced Bit-Width Queue Processors” by Arquimedes Canedo et al., presents a compiler technique for generating compact codes for embedded processors. The next three papers are on hardware management for embedded and ubiquitous computing. The fifth paper in this special issue, entitled “Energy-Efficient Considerations on a Variable-Bitrate PCI-Express Device”, by Jian-Jia Chen et al., presents a dynamic power management (DPM) algorithm for variable-bitrate PCI devices for power saving. The sixth paper, entitled “Design and Synthesis of An Multiprocessor System-on-Chip Architecture for Real-Time Biomedical Signal Processing in Gamma Cameras”, by Kai Sun et al., discusses communication synthesis and areacost reduction for an MPSOC Gamma Camera. The seventh paper, entitled “Variable Length Pattern Matching for Hardware Network Intrusion Detection System”, by Chun Xue et al., presents a high-performance hardware-based network intrusion detection system. The last four papers are related to wireless-network applications. The eighth paper in this special issue, entitled “A Lightweight Authentication Protocol for Low-Cost RFID” by Hung-Yu Chien et al., proposes a lightweight L.-P. Chang (*) Department of Computer Science, National Chiao-Tung University, Hsin-Chu, Taiwan, Republic of China e-mail: lpchang@cs.nctu.edu.tw

Special issue of selected papers from EUC 2005

This special issue includes the extended versions of seven best papers from the 2005 IFIP International Conference on Embedded And Ubiquitous Computing (EUC’2005), held in Nagasaki, Japan, in December 2005. The EUC 2005 conference included 114 papers from 376 submissions and provided the great opportunity to bring together engineers and researchers from academia, industry, and government to address a broad range of challenges and opportunities in the design and implementation of embedded and ubiquitous systems that impact every aspect of our daily lives. The selected seven papers take a snapshot of the state of the art research in the filed.

A Method for Patching Interleaving-Replay Attacks in Faulty Security Protocols

The verification of security protocols has attracted a lot of interest in the formal methods community, yielding two main verification approaches: i) state exploration, e.g. FDR [Gavin Lowe. Breaking and fixing the needham-schroeder public-key protocol using FDR. In TACAs'96: Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Tools and Algorithms for Construction and Analysis of Systems, pages 147–166, London, UK, 1996. Springer-Verlag] and OFMC [A.D. Basin, S. Mödersheim, and L. Viganò. An on-the-fly model-checker for security protocol analysis. In D. Gollmann and E. Snekkenes, editors, ESORICS'03: 8th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security, number 2808 in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 253–270, Gjøvik, Norway, 2003. Springer-Verlag]; and ii) theorem proving, e.g. the Isabelle inductive method [Lawrence C. Paulson. The inductive approach to verifying cryptographic protocols. Journal in Computer Security, 6(1-2):85–128, 1998] and Coral [G. Steel, A. Bundy, and M. Maidl. Attacking the asokan-ginzboorg protocol for key distribution in an ad-hoc bluetooth network using coral. In H. König, M. Heiner, and A. Wolisz, editors, IFIP TC6 /WG 6.1: Proceedings of 23rd IFIP International Conference on Formal Techniques for Networked and Distributed Systems, volume 2767, pages 1–10, Berlin, Germany, 2003. FORTE 2003 (work in progress papers)]. Complementing formal methods, Abadi and Needham's principles aim to guide the design of security protocols in order to make them simple and, hopefully, correct [M. Abadi and R. Needham. Prudent engineering practice for cryptographic protocols. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 22(1):6–15, 1996]. We are interested in a problem related to verification but far less explored: the correction of faulty security protocols. Experience has shown that the analysis of counterexamples or failed proof attempts often holds the key to the completion of proofs and for the correction of a faulty model. In this paper, we introduce a method for patching faulty security protocols that are susceptible to an interleaving-replay attack. Our method makes use of Abadi and Needham's principles for the prudent engineering practice for cryptographic protocols in order to guide the location of the fault in a protocol as well as the proposition of candidate patches. We have run a test on our method with encouraging results. The test set includes 21 faulty security protocols borrowed from the Clark-Jacob library [J. Clark and J. Jacob. A survey of authentication protocol literature: Version 1.0. Technical report, Department of Computer Science, University of York, November 1997. A complete specification of the Clark-Jacob library in CAPSL is available at http://www.cs.sri.com/millen/capsl/].

Selected papers from Middleware'98: The IFIP International Conference on Distributed Systems Platforms and Open Distributed Processing

In recent years the distributed systems community has witnessed a growth in the number of conferences, leading to difficulties in tracking the literature and a consequent loss of awareness of work done by others in this important research domain. In an attempt to synthesize many of the smaller workshops and conferences in the field, and to bring together research communities which were becoming fragmented, IFIP staged Middleware'98: The IFIP International Conference on Distributed Systems Platforms and Open Distributed Processing. The conference was widely publicized and attracted over 150 technical submissions including 135 full paper submissions. The final programme consisted of 28 papers, giving an acceptance ratio of a little over one in five. More crucially, the programme accurately reflected the state of the art in middleware research, addressing issues such as ORB architectures, engineering of large-scale systems and multimedia. The traditional role of middleware as a point of integration and service provision was clearly intact, but the programme stressed the importance of emerging `must-have' features such as support for extensibility, mobility and quality of service. The Middleware'98 conference was held in the Lake District, UK in September 1998. Over 160 delegates made the journey to one of the UK's most beautiful regions and contributed to a lively series of presentations and debates. A permanent record of the conference, including transcripts of the panel discussions which took place, is available at: http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/middleware98/ Based on their original reviews and the reactions of delegates to the ensuing presentations we have selected six papers from the conference for publication in this special issue of Distributed Systems Engineering. The first paper, entitled `Jonathan: an open distributed processing environment in Java', by Dumant et al describes a minimal, modular ORB framework which can be used for supporting real-time and multimedia applications. The framework provides mechanisms by which services such as CORBA ORBs can be constructed as personalities which exploit the services provided by the underlying minimal kernel. The issue of engineering ORBs is taken further in the second paper, `The implementation of a high-performance ORB over multiple network transports' by Lo and Pope. This paper is of particular interest since it presents the concrete results of running a modern ORB, i.e. omniORB2, over a range of transport mechanisms, including TCP/IP, shared memory and ATM AAL5. However, in order for middleware to progress, future platforms must tackle the issue of scalability as well as that of performance. For this reason we have included two papers, `Systems support for scalable and fault tolerant Internet services' by Chawathe and Brewer and `A scalable middleware solution for advanced wide-area Web services' by van Steen et al, which address the problems inherent in developing scalable middleware. Although the two papers focus on different problems in this area, they are both motivated by the explosion of services and information made available through the World Wide Web. Indeed, the role of the World Wide Web as a component in middleware platforms featured prominently in the conference and this is reflected in our choice of the paper by Cao et al entitled `Active Cache: caching dynamic contents on the Web'. Motivated once again by the problems of scalability, Cao et al propose a system to support the caching of dynamic documents. This is achieved by enabling small applets to be cached along with pages and run by the cache servers. The issues of security, trust and resource utilization raised by such a system are explored in detail by the authors. Finally, `Mobile Java objects' by Hayton et al considers these issues still further as part of the authors' work on adding object mobility to Java. Together, the six papers contained within this issue of Distributed Systems Engineering capture the essence of Middleware'98 and demonstrate the progress that has been made in the field. Of particular note is the systems-oriented focus of these papers: the field has clearly matured beyond modelling and into the domain of advanced systems development. We hope that the papers contained here stimulate and inform you and we look forward to meeting you at a future Middleware conference.

IFIP international conference on human factors in information systems analysis and design: Schärding, Austria, 5–8 June, 1990

IFIP international conference on human factors in information systems analysis and design: Schärding, Austria, 5–8 June, 1990

Interact '87—Second IFIP international conference on human-computer interaction : September 1–4, 1987, University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Fed. Rep. Germany

Interact '87—Second IFIP international conference on human-computer interaction : September 1–4, 1987, University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Fed. Rep. Germany

Total Ordering Problem

The problem of finding a total ordering of a finite set satisfying a given set of in-between restrictions is considered. It is shown that the problem is $NP$-complete.