An Ontology Framework for Managing Security Attacks and Defences in Component Based Software Systems

The rapid evolution of component-based software brings great challenges to its maintenance in the later phase, so it is quite necessary to measure the risk its changes bring to the whole system. Through redefining the component dependency graph, the paper presents a two-step approach to assess the change risk of component-based software (CBS), which results from the partial changes of components in system. After obtaining the change risk of single component, we transform the component dependency graph to a component dependency tree, and then calculate the change risk of the whole CBS according to paths in the tree. In addition, a case study is made to illustrate how the technique works.

A mapping study to investigate component-based software system metrics

Cost effective development is the prime goal for software developers. To achieve this goal, nowadays, component-based software system (CBSS) are developed. In CBSS, the existing components are reused to develop a new software system which increases the reusability of components. It also reduces time and efforts of software developers, which is cost effective. The success or failure of software system depends on its usability. Usability can increase the market revenue. So, to increase the acceptance rate of CBSS among the users, it is important to evaluate the usability of CBSS before the software is released. In this paper, usability of CBSS is evaluated based on four input factors by using two widely used soft computing techniques, i.e., fuzzy logic and adaptive neuro fuzzy logic. Experimental results obtained from both the techniques are also compared and it is observed that ANFIS approach reduces the error rate and provide more accurate results. This research work will help the software developers to estimate the usability of CBSS in a more efficient manner.

Component Based Software Engineering (CBSE) provides a way to create a new Component Based Software System (CBSS) by utilizing the existing components. The primary reason for that is to minimize the software development time, cost and effort. CBSS also increases the component reusability. Due to these advantages, software industries are working on CBSS and continuously trying to provide quality product. Usability is one of the major quality factors for CBSS. It should be measured before delivering the software product to the customer, so that if there are any usability flaws, it can be removed by software development team. In this paper, work has been done to evaluate the usability of CBSS based on major usability sub-factors (learnability, operability, understandability and configurability). For this purpose, firstly software metrics are identified for each usability sub-factor and the value of each sub-factor is evaluated for a component based software project. Secondly, overall usability of the software project is evaluated by using the calculated value of each usability sub-factor. Usability for the same project was also evaluated using Fuzzy approach in MATLAB to validate the experimental work of this research paper. It was identified that the value of usability obtained from software metrics and fuzzy model was very similar. This research work will be useful for the software developer to evaluate the usability of any CBSS and will also help them to compare different version of any CBSS in term of their usability.

Current agent architectures provided by MAS platforms impose some limitation that affect the development of the functionality of software agents from scratch, placing little emphasis on (re)configuration and (re)use. This paper presents a software agent architecture development approach using a component and aspect–based architecture that promotes building agents from reusable software components and the configuration of some software agents. The basis of our architecture is the use of component-based and aspect-based software development concepts to separate agent functionality into independent entities increasing extensibility, maintainability and adaptability of the agent to new environments and demands. The architecture simplifies the software agent development process, which can be reduced to the description of the agents’ constituent components and supported agent interaction protocols using XML documents. In addition, the extensibility provided by the component orientation enables to extend and reconfigure the internal agent architecture to accomplish additional agent capabilities such as planning.

A novel approach for component-based fault-tolerant software development

Metric-based Evaluation of Implemented Software Architectures

Component based software development (CBSD) endeavors to deliver cost-effective and quality software systems through the selection and integration of commercially available software components. CBSD emphasizes the design and development of software systems using preexisting components. Software component reusability is an indispensable part of component based software development life cycle (CBSDLC), which consumes a significant amount of organization’s resources, that is, time and effort. It is convenient in component based software system (CBSS) to select the most suitable and appropriate software components that provide all the required functionalities. Selecting the most appropriate components is crucial for the success of the entire system. However, decisions regarding software component reusability are often made in an ad hoc manner, which ultimately results in schedule delay and lowers the entire quality system. In this paper, we have discussed the analytic network process (ANP) method for software component selection. The methodology is explained and assessed using a real life case study.

Estimating Non-functional Properties of Component-based Software Based on Resource Consumption

Many regard widespread development and reuse of software components as one of the next biggest phenomena for software. However, widespread reuse of a software component with poor quality may lead to disasters. Improper reuse of software components of good quality may also be disastrous. Testing and quality assurance is therefore critical for both software components and component-based software systems. This tutorial provides an in-depth look at the technical issues, challenges, managerial aspects, and needs in testing of components and systems. Moreover, this tutorial reports on the recent advances and research efforts in developing new solutions to solve those problems and meet those needs, from the perspectives of component-based software engineering. The tutorial will discuss the state-of-the-art practice, issues, and challenges, new solutions and research efforts in third-party component testing, component-based program validation, and test automation. The targeted audience includes technical managers, software testing engineers, quality assurance people, and development engineers who are working on component-based software projects. The tutorial will be useful for professionals, researchers, and students interested in understanding the general concepts and methods in component testing and component-based software validation. This tutorial assumes that participants have a general understanding of software engineering and software testing methods, and have some working experience in software development and validation.

SummaryThe rapidly growing cloud computing paradigm provides a cost‐effective platform for storing, sharing, and delivering data and computation through internet connectivity. However, one of the biggest barriers for massive cloud adoption is the growing cybersecurity threats/risks that influence its confidence and feasibility. Existing threat models for clouds may not be able to capture complex attacks. For example, an attacker may combine multiple security vulnerabilities into an intelligent, persistent, and sequence of attack behaviors that will continuously act to compromise the target on clouds. Hence, new models for detection of complex and diversified network attacks are needed. In this article, we introduce an effective threat modeling approach that has the ability to predict and detect the probability of occurrence of various security threats and attacks within the cloud environment using hidden Markov models (HMMs). The HMM is a powerful statistical analysis technique and is used to create a probability matrix based on the sensitivity of the data and possible system components that can be attacked. In addition, the HMM is used to provide supplemental information to discover a trend attack pattern from the implicit (or hidden) raw data. The proposed model is trained to identify anomalous sequences or threats so that accurate and up‐to‐date information on risk exposure of cloud‐hosted services are properly detected. The proposed model would act as an underlying framework and a guiding tool for cloud systems security experts and administrators to secure processes and services over the cloud. The performance evaluation shows the effectiveness of the proposed approach to find attack probability and the number of correctly detected attacks in the presence of multiple attack scenarios.

Component-Based Software Engineering is a perfect approach for rapid software development with the maturity of components. The estimation of Component-Based Software (CBS) reliability from the reliabilities of constituent components and architecture is a matter of concern. In this paper we propose a Reliability Estimation Model for CBS to estimate the reliability through path propagation probability and component impact factor. This model incorporates the idea of path propagation to estimate overall system reliability after integration of components, which considers the contribution of the individual components that get activated during an execution path. This model also estimates the impact factor of individual components on overall reliability. The impact factor can be used to focus the efforts to obtain the best reliability improvements. To evaluate the Reliability Estimation Model including both the factors, we implement it through JAVA, which is based on an adapted example case study. Lastly we conclude that proposed model is useful to estimate the reliability of CBS and can be used adaptively in early stages of software development.

Regression testing is the process of testing a modified system using the old test suite. As the test suite size is large, system retesting consumes large amount of time and computing resources. This issue of retesting of software systems can be handled using a good test case prioritization technique. A prioritization technique schedules the test cases for execution so that the test cases with higher priority executed before lower priority. The objective of test case prioritization is to detect fault as early as possible so that the debuggers can begin their work earlier. In this paper we propose a new prioritization technique to prioritize the test cases to perform regression testing for Component Based Software System (CBSS). The components and the state changes for a component based software systems are being represented by UML state chart diagrams which are then converted into Component Interaction Graph (CIG) to describe the interrelation among components. Our prioritization algorithm takes this CIG as input along with the old test cases and generates a prioritized test suit taking into account total number of state changes and total number of database access, both direct and indirect, encountered due to each test case. Our algorithm is found to be very effective in maximizing the objective function and minimizing the cost of system retesting when applied to few JAVA projects.

DOI: 10.1049/ic:20040498 ISBN: 0 86341 434 6 Location: Edinburgh, UK Conference date: 25 May 2004 Format: PDF Specifying and enforcing constraints and invariants such as architectural constraints and data typing, strongly enhances the safety and reliability of the software system. Next to design and development constraints, the composition of software systems in component-based software also introduces composition time constraints and dependencies. In data-centered software systems, for example, the software composer implicitly creates dataflow dependencies between software components. Describing composition time constraints and enforcing these constraints at deploy time or at run-time strongly improves the safety and reliability of the software. In this paper, we present an approach for expressing and enforcing dataflow dependencies in data-centered software systems, and conclude with a validation of the approach in a servlet-based case study. Inspec keywords: object-oriented programming; software reliability; data flow analysis Subjects: Software engineering techniques; Object-oriented programming

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