Distributed, real-time and embedded (DRE) applications are often deployed into mission-critical scenarios where money or lives are at stake. Examples of these types of scenarios include search-and-rescue missions, shipboard computing, satellite infrastructure, power grids, and air traffic control. Once deployed, these DRE applications must service important requests continuously and perpetually...

This paper presents analysis and interpretation of OGLE photometric data of four X-ray binary pulsar systems in the Small Magellanic Cloud: 1WGA J0054.9-7226, RX J0050.7-7316, RX J0049.1-7250, and 1SAX J0103.2-7209. In each case, the probable optical counterpart is identified on the basis of its optical colours. In the case of RX J0050.7-7316 the regular modulation of its optical light curve ap...

In recent years, operating systems have become increasingly complex and thus more prone to security and performance issues. Accordingly, system updates to address these issues have become more frequently available and increasingly important. To complete such updates, users must reboot their systems, resulting in unavoidable downtime and further loss of the states of running applications. We pre...

The Android framework utilizes a permission-based security model, which is essentially a variation of the ACL-based access control mechanism. This security model provides controlled access to various system resources. Access control systems are known to be vulnerable to anomalies in security policies, such as inconsistency. In this work, we focus on inconsistent security enforcement within the ...

The set of virtual devices offered by a hypervisor to its guest VMs is a virtualization component ripe with security exploits – more than half of all vulnerabilities of today’s hypervisors are found in this codebase. This paper presents Min-V, a hypervisor that disables all virtual devices not critical to running VMs in the cloud. Of the remaining devices, Min-V takes a step further and elimina...

We present a source-level kernel profiler named KLAS. Since this profiler is based on dynamic aspect-orientation, it allows the users to describe any code fragment in the C language. That code fragment is automatically executed for collecting detailed performance data at execution points specified by the users. Enabling dynamic aspect-orientation is crucial since otherwise the users would have ...

Traditional theory and practice of write-ahead logging and of database recovery techniques revolve around three failure classes: transaction failures resolved by rollback; system failures (typically software faults) resolved by restart with log analysis, “redo,” and “undo” phases; and media failures (typically hardware faults) resolved by restore operations that combine multiple types of backup...

We have implemented a proof-of-concept prototype named Blutopia that embodies our ideas of a new software life cycle management paradigm driven chiefly by simplicity. Aiming at facilitating management, Blutopia allows administrators to deploy multiple machines fast and effortlessly in as little time as it takes to perform a system reboot. It is equally easy to manage and augment the deployed in...

In a cold boot attack a cryptosystem is compromised by analysing a noisy version of its internal state. For instance, if a computer is rebooted the memory contents are rarely fully reset; instead, after the reboot an adversary might recover a noisy image of the old memory contents and use it as a stepping stone for reconstructing secret keys. While such attacks were known for a long time, they ...

Patches to modern operating systems, including bug fixes and security updates, and the reboots and downtime they require, cause tremendous problems for system users and administrators. The aim of this research is to develop a model for dynamic update of operating systems, allowing a system to be patched without the need for a reboot or other service interruption. In this work, a model for dynam...