Activities

Current projects

KARYON: Kernel-based ARchitecture for safetY-critical cONtrol
Sponsoring bodies: EU-FP7
Partners: FCUL (P), Magdeburg University (D), Chalmers University (S), GMV-Skysoft (P), Embraer (BR), SP (S), 4S Group (I)
Start date: October, 2011
Duration: 3 years

KARYON addresses the problem of finding robust cruising strategies for the vehicles based on strategy information from other vehicles, an estimation of the global system state, and how confident one is about this estimation. This problem is not trivial, since there are no obvious or aprioristic “safe states” or “safe” manoeuvres to do in case of too little, too unreliable, or too inconsistent information about the environment and other vehicles. KARYON will define a system architecture that is based on a small local safety kernel that will prevent dangerous behaviour. Because this is a very small subsystem compared to the overall complex control system, its predictably can be justified. This is essential for guaranteeing overall safety along a set of safety rules. KARYON will further investigate the relevant fault detection concepts, particularly for the sensor systems, needed to show fulfilment of dependability attributes and argue about safety according to safety standards. Simulation and mixed reality techniques will be developed to validate the approach. KARYON will integrate concepts in advanced event dissemination middleware and in improved simulation and fault-injection tools for assessing the behaviour of autonomous, mobile systems under failure conditions. The project will implement proof-of-concept prototypes and a simulation-based demonstration of the results for scenarios from the automotive and avionics areas, respectively.

TRONE - Trustworthy and Resilient Operations in a Network Environment
Sponsoring bodies: FCT
Partners: FCUL, FCTUC, Carnegie Mellon University, PT Comunicações
Start date: October, 2010
Duration: 3 years

The leading objective of TRONE is ensuring a seamless and dynamic enforcement of the dependability and security of network services in New Generation Networks. The project will focus on reducing hazards, both proactively, by increasing architecture robustness, and reactively, by improving the means for detection and recovery from anomalous situations like faults and attacks. It will investigate innovative ways to apply fault/failure diagnosis, detection and prevention/tolerance techniques, in symbiosis with automated or semi-automated reconfiguration and adaptation dynamics, in order to preserve stability of network operation against accidents or attacks.

MASSIF - MAnagement of Security information and events in Service Infrastructures
Sponsoring bodies: EU FP7
Project Number: 257475
Partners: Atos (Coordinator), CINI, Epsilon, Orange Labs, Fraunhofer, FCUL, SPIRAS, Télècom SudParis, AlienVault, T-Systems, UPM, 6CURE
Start date: October, 2010
Duration: 3 years

The main objective of MASSIF (MAnagement of Security information and events in Service Infrastructures) is to achieve a significant advance in the area of SIEM (Security Information and Event Management). On the base of proper multi-level event correlation MASSIF will provide innovation techniques in order to enable the detection of upcoming security threats and trigger remediation actions even before the occurrence of possible security incidences. Thus, MASSIF will develop a new generation SIEM framework for service infrastructures supporting intelligent, scalable, and multi-level/multi-domain security event processing and predictive security monitoring. Such service-level SIEM involves the modelling and formal validation of security, including trusted computing concepts, architecture for dependable and resilient collection of service events, supported by an extremely scalable and high performance event collection and processing framework, in the context of service-level attack models.

CloudFIT - Fault and Intrusion Tolerance for Cloud Computing
Sponsoring bodies: FCT
Project Number: PTDC/EIA-CCO/108299/2008
Partners: FCUL
Start date: January, 2010
Duration: 2 years

Cloud computing has gained strong popularity in the past years. Cloud architectures typically combine a potentially large number of heterogeneous, loosely coupled and geographically dispersed computers connected via the Internet to form a single unified system that hosts service applications. Cloud architectures make it difficult to apply traditional security approaches. For example, global management policies are difficult to enforce when clouds cross administrative boundaries. At the same time, software complexity is steadily increasing, making it practically infeasible to guarantee the absence of security vulnerabilities in it. As a consequence, implementing dependable services in a cloud faced by malicious attacks is a challenging task. Intrusion tolerance is a paradigm that allows implementing services in a way that they can correctly provide their functionality in spite of malicious intrusions in some of the cloud nodes. The objective of this project is to define an infrastructure for intrusion-tolerant services in a cloud environment. In order to achieve this goal, we use intrusion-tolerant replication, which allows tolerating intrusions in a subset of the replicas.

CMU-PT partnership at FCUL
Partners: Carnegie Mellon University, FCUL
Start date: August, 2007
Duration: 5 years

The program has a duration of 5 years, divided in two phases. Besides community building actions, two exploratory projects are defined for the first phase (2 years): P1 - Security and Dependability of Large-scale Computer Systems; P2 - Secure Systems-of-Embedded-Systems. Focused projects, with a duration of 3 years, are to be defined at the end of phase 1.

Past projects

HIDENETS - HIghly DEpendable ip-based NETworks and Services
Sponsoring bodies: European Commission - IST Programme
Project number: IST-FP6-STREP-26979
Total award amount: 2.500.000 Euro
Coordinator: AAU
Partners: AAU, BME, Carmeq, Fujitsu-Siemens, LAAS, Telenor, FCUL, WMC, UNIFI
Start date: January 1, 2006
Duration: 3 years

The aim of HIDENETS was to develop and analyze end-to-end resilience solutions for distributed applications and mobility-aware services in ubiquitous communication scenarios. Technical solutions were developed for applications with critical dependability requirements in the context of selected use-cases of ad-hoc car-to-car communication with infrastructure service support.

TACID - Timely ACID Transactions in DBMS
Sponsoring bodies: FCT
Project Number: POSC/EIA/61568/2004
Total award amount: 54,500 Euro
Coordinator: FCTUC
Partners: FCTUC, FCUL
Start date: August 20, 2005
Duration: 2 years

The main goal of the project was to investigate ways to add timeliness properties to the typical ACID transactions. Three transaction classes were considered: 1. With no temporal requirements: i.e., ACID transactions 2. With restrict temporal requirements: for this class the database users will be able to specify a time frame in which the transaction has to be concluded to succeed. In this class, the system must provide timing failure detection, including in distributed transaction environments. 3. With probabilistic temporal requirements: in this class the transactions are always executed independently of time frame specified by the user. However, a probability for the execution of a given transaction on that time frame will be provided.

CORTEX - CO-operating Real-time senTient objects: architecture and EXperimental evaluation
Sponsoring bodies: European Commission - IST Programme
Project Number: IST-2000-26031
Total award amount: 2,094,000 Euro
Coordinator: FCUL
Partners: FCUL, T.C.D., Univ. Lancaster, Univ. Ulm
Start date: April 2001
Duration: 3 years

The key objective of CORTEX was to explore the fundamental theoretical and engineering issues necessary to support the use of sentient objects to construct large-scale proactive applications and thereby to validate the use of sentient objects as a viable approach to the construction of such applications.

MICRA - A Model for the Development of MIssion CRitical Applications
Sponsoring bodies: FCT
Project Number: PRAXIS/P/EEI/12160/1998
Total award amount: 39,500 Euro
Coordinator: FCUL
Partners: FCUL, DSG/UC
Start date: September 1999
Duration: 2 years

The objective of this project was the definition of a model suitable for mission-critical applications, considering timing fault-tolerance in the context of real-time systems as the crucial aspect to address. In this project we developed what we called a Timing Failure Detector, with the ability to perfectly detect all timing failures.

DEAR-COTS: Distributed Embedded Architectures using Commercial Off-The-Shelf Components
Sponsoring bodies: FCT
Project Number: PRAXIS/P/EEI/14187/1998
Total award amount: 38,750 Euro
Coordinator: FCUL
Partners: FCUL, IST, ISEP, FEUP
Start date: October 1999
Duration: 2 years

The main purpose of the DEAR-COTS project was the specification of an architecture based on the use of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components, able to support distributed computer controlled systems where safety and timeliness were major requirements.

DINAS - DQS: Design and Implementation of CNMA-based Networks for CIME Applications in SMEs
Sponsoring bodies: Esprit
Coordinator: Intracom
Partners: Intracom, Intrasoft, IPK-Berlin, INESC, Hyperion
Start date: October 1992
Duration: 2 years

Several ESPRIT projects have produced architectures and technologies for the interconnection of nodes in distributed systems: protocols, communication stacks. Some of these technologies have not solved all the problems encountered in their target environments: - the difficulty of integrating with efficiency different cell network technologies; - the lack of integration of cell networks with high-speed backbones such as FDDI; - the achievement of reliable real-time operation, namely in the input/output part of the system.

The objective of DINAS was to address these problems in the scope of a distributed quality control application in a large-scale factory setting. Technology emerging from the ESPRIT project CNMA was used in the project, being complemented with custom developments or other off-the-shelf components when necessary.