Dipartimento di Informatica, Sistemistica e ComunicazioneDipartimento di Informatica, Sistemistica e Comunicazione

Università degli Studi di Milano – BicoccaUniversità degli Studi di Milano – Bicocca

Claudio Ferretti Alberto Leporati

{ferretti,leporati}@disco.unimib.it{ferretti,leporati}@disco.unimib.it

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Research Areas and Approaches

Open Source:Source code available ...... from Operating Systems to Applications

Computer Security:on Networks, and in Applications

The Lab explores these (then new) technological areas

It established links to: students, professors, companies

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Activities...

...with students:Theses (around 20 per year)“LUGs”

...with our University:

Making open source tools available in shared laboratories

Training skilled technicians

...with Companies

Stages

Joint research

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Research Activities: PhD students

A. Gallini:

Computational and Programming Models for Molecular-scale devices based machines

S. Orciari:

Integration of 3G and wireless LAN architectures: a perspective on authentication

S. Felloni:

Decoherence, inaccuracy and errors in quantum information processing

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Theoretical backgrounds,and technological interests

Faculty staff in OpenIt also do research in the BIMIB Lab

Research topics are strongly influenced by such scientific backgrounds (theoretical models and their properties)

In OpenIt, we link models to applications

Also, OpenIt supports technical developments required by researches in BIMIB

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Research Activities: papers

Some research papers:

• D. Molteni, C. Ferretti, G. Mauri. Frequency Membrane Systems. Computing and Informatics, 2008.

• A. Leporati, C. Ferretti, G. Mauri, M.J. Pérez-Jiménez, C. Zandron. Complexity aspects of polarizationless membrane systems. Natural Computing, 2008.

• A. Leporati, S. Felloni. Three “Quantum” algorithms to solve 3-SAT. Theoretical Computer Science, 2007.

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About funding and grants

ERC Starting Grant proposal:

“Theoretical Foundations of Computer

and Network Security”

Topic: the computational model called “membrane systems” can be used to formalize highly structured computer networks, which require the definition of provably secure firewall rules

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Results and Demonstrators

Bio-inspired computational models became:

A Java-based parallel simulator, tested on a small clusterAn adaptive and fault-tolerant (simulated) “Bio-Floor”: Someone on the floor (yellow dot) moving up, and tiles light up anticipating his movement

Further computational models:

An obfuscating processor, based on “register machines”

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Activities...

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Activities...

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More specific: Security

“Obfuscating” network traffic:a distributed system mixing false and real traffic to defeat its analisys

Assisted generation of firewalls' ACLs:from simple checking to automatic building

with the help from traffic samples

On these topics: ongoing collaboration with “TELCO” laboratory

Obfuscating software:On these topics: ongoing collaboration with “ESSERE” laboratory

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More specific: Open Source

We are interested in making good use of source code, especially available in the open source technological arena

A whole growing area is that of fruitfully mixing static information (source code) and information gathered at runtime (e.g.: syscall tracing)

Expected areas of application:

extracting Patternssecurity Checkssmart debugging tools

In collaboration with “ESSERE”

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Theory, also

About extracting Patterns:• Tracing the execution of a given program, in

addition to the static analysis of the source code, helps in recognizing programming patterns in that software product

• the problem opens interesting theoretical issues, for example concerning the computational complexity of this pattern extraction , when patterns are modeled as graphs

Security checks on applications:• Adding runtime informations to static analysis

helps in reducing false positives, or in defining heuristics

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Approach: integration inopen source tools

Given the availability of (open) source code:

whenever possible we develop tools as extensions to existing projects, or as plugins for them…

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Approach: integration inopen source tools

Example: a tool developed as a plugin for the Eclipse IDE platform