In this paper we propose some extensions necessary to enable the speci-cation and description language SDL to become an appropriate formalism for the design of real-time and embedded systems. The extensions we envisage concern both roles of SDL: First, in order to make SDL a real-time speciication language, allowing to correctly simulate and verify real-time speciications, we propose a set of a...

Last-Level Cache (LLC) attacks typically exploit timing side channels in hardware, and thus rely heavily on timers for their operation. Many proposed defenses against such side-channel attacks capitalize on this reliance. This paper presents PRIME+ABORT, a new cache attack which bypasses these defenses by not depending on timers for its function. Instead of a timing side channel, PRIME+ABORT le...

We address the question of how one evaluates the usefulness of a heuristic program on a particular input. If theoretical tools do not allow us to decide for every instance whether a particular heuristic is fast enough, might we at least write a simple, fast companion program that makes this decision on some inputs of interest? We call such a companion program a timer for the heuristic. Timers a...

Given the intractability of exhaustively verifying software, the use of runtime-verification, to verify single execution paths at runtime, is becoming popular. Although the use of runtime verification is increasing in industrial settings, various challenges still are to be faced to enable it to spread further. We present dynamic communicating automata with timers and events to describe properti...

This paper studies the performance of BSD-based TCP implementations in Web servers. We find that lack of scalability with respect to high TCP connection rates reduces the throughput of Web servers by up to 25% and imposes a memory overhead of up to 32 MB on the kernel. We also find that insufficient accuracy in TCP’s timers results in overly conservative delays for retransmission timeouts, caus...

In this paper we propose a solution to the problem of distinguishing between causal and acausal temporal sets of rules. The method, called the Temporal Investigation Method for Enregistered Record Sequences (TIMERS), is explained and introduced formally. The input to TIMERS consists of a sequence of records, where each record is observed at regular intervals. Sets of rules are generated from th...

In this paper, we propose a novel class of symmetric key distribution protocol that leverages basic security primitives offered by low-cost, hardware chipsets containing millions synchronized self-powered timers. The keys are derived from the temporal dynamics physical, micro-scale time-keeping device which makes immune to any potential side-channel attacks, malicious tampering, or snooping. Us...

We present a simple BGP simulator that is used for testing convergence properties of inter-domain routing. The discrete-event driven simulator contains a high-level abstraction model of the BGP protocol. The purpose is to perform simulations to examine the complexity of routing information exchange and to test different possible reasons for delayed convergence of BGP routing. We have simulated ...

Owing to the Internet’s rapid expansion and fast advancing PC technology, there are many PC-based network systems now. For increasingly many applications running over the Internet, guaranteeing QoS on these PC-based systems has become an issue of some concern. In this paper, we investigate QoS failures that occur on PC-based systems and focus on one aspect of the problem that arises from coarse...

Monomeric fluorescent proteins of different colors are widely used to study behavior and targeting of proteins in living cells. Fluorescent proteins that irreversibly change their spectral properties in response to light irradiation of a specific wavelength, or photoactivate, have become increasingly popular to image intracellular dynamics and superresolution protein localization. Until recentl...