Pervasive Software Research Articles

Correctness enhancement: a pervasive software engineering paradigm

Refinement-based correctness-preserving transformations are considered as the gold standard of program transformations. While we do not dispute the merits of transforming programs in a way that preserves their correctness, we argue that the vast majority of software engineering processes are in fact instances of correctness enhancement rather than correctness preservation. In this paper, we discuss mathematics of correctness enhancement, i.e., the process of making a program more correct than it is with respect to a specification; then we highlight in what way and to what extent correctness enhancement pervades the practice of software engineering.

Evolutionary Computing Environments: Implementing Security Risks Management and Benchmarking

This research makes a focus on evolutionary computing environments i.e. Pervasive, Internet of Things, Artificially Intelligent (AI) and Big Data risks management. The contribution of paper lies in identifying, managing risks in advanced computing paradigms, mitigating security risks and benchmarking smart softwares. As the security and privacy of big volume data is heated discussion these days due to several vulnerabilities in data posed by its pervasive nature so the paper has implemented the security risks mitigation in big data projects. In addition, the benchmarking of pervasive software is done with the help of an intelligent tool for detecting application frameworks and security vulnerabilities. The application is scanned, and the intelligent tool quantifies the severity levels to provide the possible solutions. This tool also collects application metrices to benchmark it against technology, application business drivers and properties to improve the quantitative Performance of the software. This research also puts an analytical foundation for various risks management concepts in evolutionary environments i.e. Pervasive, AI, Internet of Things and Big Data.

Correctness enhancement: a pervasive software engineering paradigm

Refinement-based correctness-preserving transformations are considered as the gold standard of program transformations. While we do not dispute the merits of transforming programs in a way that preserves their correctness, we argue that the vast majority of software engineering processes are in fact instances of correctness enhancement rather than correctness preservation. In this paper, we discuss mathematics of correctness enhancement, i.e., the process of making a program more correct than it is with respect to a specification; then we highlight in what way and to what extent correctness enhancement pervades the practice of software engineering.

Skype & Type

Voice-over-IP (VoIP) software are among the most widely spread and pervasive software, counting millions of monthly users. However, we argue that people ignore the drawbacks of transmitting information along with their voice, such as keystroke sounds—as such sound can reveal what someone is typing on a keyboard. In this article, we present and assess a new keyboard acoustic eavesdropping attack that involves VoIP, called Skype & Type ( S&T ). Unlike previous attacks, S&T assumes a weak adversary model that is very practical in many real-world settings. Indeed, S&T is very feasible, as it does not require (i) the attacker to be physically close to the victim (either in person or with a recording device) and (ii) precise profiling of the victim’s typing style and keyboard; moreover, it can work with a very small amount of leaked keystrokes. We observe that leakage of keystrokes during a VoIP call is likely, as people often “multi-task” during such calls. As expected, VoIP software acquires and faithfully transmits all sounds, including emanations of pressed keystrokes, which can include passwords and other sensitive information. We show that one very popular VoIP software (Skype) conveys enough audio information to reconstruct the victim’s input—keystrokes typed on the remote keyboard. Our results demonstrate that, given some knowledge on the victim’s typing style and keyboard model, the attacker attains top-5 accuracy of 91.7% in guessing a random key pressed by the victim. This work extends previous results on S&T , demonstrating that our attack is effective with many different recording devices (such as laptop microphones, headset microphones, and smartphones located in proximity of the target keyboard), diverse typing styles and speed, and is particularly threatening when the victim is typing in a known language.

Secure Automotive Software: The Next Steps

Previous research revealed pervasive software vulnerabilities in modern automobiles. This article presents a rejoinder to that research, discussing four general approaches to secure automotive software systems: compile-time assurance, runtime protection, automated testing, and architectural security. The authors discuss these approaches in the context of previous automotive exploits and the authors' work to build secure cyber-physical systems. This article is part of a theme issue on Automotive Software.

A Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture for contextual visualisation of task-based multi-dimensional energy KPIs in a manufacturing process

ABSTRACTExisting energy-monitoring tools do not offer to monitor the basic 3 C’s of energy, that is, cost, carbon emission and more importantly direct energy consumption with its associated value-added and auxiliary components in a single envelope during the entire hierarchy of a manufacturing process. The visualisation of these hierarchical Key process indicators (KPIs), however, poses a multi-dimensional and hierarchal data visualisation problem. We in this paper introduce through Focus-plus-Context and treemap visualisation techniques, a platform-independent pervasive software solution, providing task-based contextual visualisation of hierarchical, multi-dimensional and relevant energy KPIs such as Total Production Units with total production energy consumed, Energy Intensity, Energy cost per production unit and Carbon emission through the entire manufacturing hierarchy of a product drilling down from the factory level to specific production lines, machines or processes. A comparison of existing energy management software along with multi-dimensional visualisation techniques is also presented in this paper.

Improving the Effectiveness of Testing Pervasive Software via Context Diversity

Context-aware pervasive software is responsive to various contexts and their changes. A faulty implementation of the context-aware features may lead to unpredictable behavior with adverse effects. In software testing, one of the most important research issues is to determine the sufficiency of a test suite to verify the software under test. Existing adequacy criteria for testing traditional software, however, have not explored the dimension of serial test inputs and have not considered context changes when constructing test suites. In this article, we define the concept of context diversity to capture the extent of context changes in serial inputs and propose three strategies to study how context diversity may improve the effectiveness of the data-flow testing criteria. Our case study shows that the strategy that uses test cases with higher context diversity can significantly improve the effectiveness of existing data-flow testing criteria for context-aware pervasive software. In addition, test suites with higher context diversity are found to execute significantly longer paths, which may provide a clue that reveals why context diversity can contribute to the improvement of effectiveness of test suites.

Challenges to Development of Standard Software Quality Model

stay ahead in competition, software organizations have to deliver required functionality consistently guaranteed with high quality. The quality expectations of customers at purchase time from the software is the major reason of emergent attention of software organizations to implement quality management in software development. Nowadays, use of Component Based Software Development (CBSD) approach is considered success factor for business because of its underlying benefits like reusability, on-time delivery, high quality, and less cost. But success of CBSD depends upon the quality of components used. Many quality models have been proposed to provide high quality products, some of these are for general usage and others are for specific applications or domains. These specific purpose models are improved or modified forms of basic quality models especially ISO 9126. This paper presents key challenges or deterrents to the development of standard, complete and pervasive software quality models, solution to these challenges and their importance is also discussed.

Formal modelling, knowledge representation and reasoning for design and development of user-centric pervasive software: a meta-review

Increasing demand for large scale and highly complex systems and applications, particularly with the emergence of pervasive computing and the impact of adaptive systems, introduces significant challenges for software development, as well as for user-machine interaction. Therefore, a perspective shift on software development and user-machine interaction is required. An amalgamation of model driven development and ontologies has been envisaged as a promising direction in recent literature. In this paper, we investigate this merged approach and conclude that a merger of both approaches, from formal modelling and knowledge representation perspective, on the one hand enables use of ontologies at run-time together with rules, prominently in terms of run-time reasoning, dynamic adaptations, software intelligibility, self-expressiveness, user involvement, and user situation awareness; and on the other hand at development time, prominently in terms of automated and incremental code generation, requirement adaptability, preservation of application knowledge, and validation and verification of structural and behavioural properties of the software. The core contribution of this paper lies in providing an elaborate and exploratory discussion of the problem and solution spaces along with a multidisciplinary meta-review and identification of complementary efforts in literature required to realise a merged approach.

An architecture-driven software mobility framework

Software architecture has been shown to provide an appropriate level of granularity for assessing a software system’s quality attributes (e.g., performance and dependability). Similarly, previous research has adopted an architecture-centric approach to reasoning about and managing the run-time adaptation of software systems. For mobile and pervasive software systems, which are known to be innately dynamic and unpredictable, the ability to assess a system’s quality attributes and manage its dynamic run-time behavior is especially important. In the past, researchers have argued that a software architecture-based approach can be instrumental in facilitating mobile computing. In this paper, we present an integrated architecture-driven framework for modeling, analysis, implementation, deployment, and run-time migration of software systems executing on distributed, mobile, heterogeneous computing platforms. In particular, we describe the framework’s support for dealing with the challenges posed by both logical and physical mobility. We also provide an overview of our experience with applying the framework to a family of distributed mobile robotics systems. This experience has verified our envisioned benefits of the approach, and has helped us to identify several avenues of future work.

Efficient virtual machine support of runtime structural reflection

Increasing trends towards adaptive, distributed, generative and pervasive software have made object-oriented dynamically typed languages become increasingly popular. These languages offer dynamic software evolution by means of reflection, facilitating the development of dynamic systems. Unfortunately, this dynamism commonly imposes a runtime performance penalty. In this paper, we describe how to extend a production JIT-compiler virtual machine to support runtime object-oriented structural reflection offered by many dynamic languages. Our approach improves runtime performance of dynamic languages running on statically typed virtual machines. At the same time, existing statically typed languages are still supported by the virtual machine. We have extended the .Net platform with runtime structural reflection adding prototype-based object-oriented semantics to the statically typed class-based model of .Net, supporting both kinds of programming languages. The assessment of runtime performance and memory consumption has revealed that a direct support of structural reflection in a production JIT-based virtual machine designed for statically typed languages provides a significant performance improvement for dynamically typed languages.

Pervasive Software Environments for Supporting Disaster Responses

In complex emergency scenarios, teams from various emergency-response organizations must collaborate. These teams include both first responders, such as police and fire departments, and those operators who coordinate the effort from operational centers. The Workpad architecture consists of a front- and a back-end layer. The front-end layer is composed of several front-end teams of first responders, and the back-end layer is an integrated peer-to-peer network that lets front-end teams collaborate through information exchange and coordination. Team members at the front end carry PDAs, with team leaders' PDAs equipped with gateway communication technologies that let them communicate with the back-end centers.

From Research to Classroom: A Course in Pervasive Computing

In a nutshell, the course is basically about emerging, visible and invisible computing systems and devices. Pervasive computing has many names, including ubiquitous computing, and its key element is the omnipresence of information devices. These devices can be embedded into cars, airplanes, ships, bikes, posters, signboards, walls, and even clothes. The course therefore focuses on independent information devices, including wearable computers, mobile phones, screen phones, and PDAs, and the services made available by them. It includes the study of computer and network architectures for pervasive computing, mobile computing, human-computer interaction using speech and vision, pervasive software systems, and experimental pervasive computing systems.

Some strategies of reuse in an object-oriented programming environment

In a single-subject study of a software developer working in an object-oriented programming environment, we found evidence of a development style characterized by pervasive software reuse. The subject employed regular strategies for template selection and coding in her work, and avoided techniques requiring deep understanding of code details or symbolic execution whenever possible. Within the limits of the design of the study, the subject's performance is related to attributes of object-oriented programming and our interpretation of the mature mental model with which she approached her task.