Related papers: Security Policy Enforcement Through Refinement Pro…

Malfunctions of a mobile ad hoc network (MANET) protocol caused by a conceptual mistake in the protocol design, rather than unreliable communication, can often be detected only by considering communication among the nodes in the network to…

Policy specification for personal user data is a hard problem, as it depends on many factors that cannot be predetermined by system developers. Simultaneously, systems are increasingly relying on users to make security decisions. In this…

Penetration Testing is a methodology for assessing network security, by generating and executing possible attacks. Doing so automatically allows for regular and systematic testing. A key question then is how to automatically generate the…

This dissertation investigates how reinforcement learning (RL) methods can be designed to be safe, sample-efficient, and robust. Framed through the unifying perspective of contextual-bandit RL, the work addresses two major application…

In big data systems, the infrastructure is such that large amounts of data are hosted away from the users. In such a system information security is considered as a major challenge. From a customer perspective, one of the big risks in…

Penetration testing (pentesting) involves performing a controlled attack on a computer system in order to assess it's security. Although an effective method for testing security, pentesting requires highly skilled practitioners and…

For the formal verification of a network security policy, it is crucial to express the verification goals. These formal goals, called security invariants, should be easy to express for the end user. Focusing on access control and…

Many tools and libraries are readily available to build and operate distributed Web applications. While the setup of operational environments is comparatively easy, practice shows that their continuous secure operation is more difficult to…

Batch reinforcement learning enables policy learning without direct interaction with the environment during training, relying exclusively on previously collected sets of interactions. This approach is, therefore, well-suited for high-risk…

As networks expand in size and complexity, they pose greater administrative and management challenges. Software Defined Networks (SDN) offer a promising approach to meeting some of these challenges. In this paper, we propose a policy driven…

The challenge in the widely applicable online matching problem lies in making irrevocable assignments while there is uncertainty about future inputs. Most theoretically-grounded policies are myopic or greedy in nature. In real-world…

In this work we seek for an approach to integrate safety in the learning process that relies on a partly known state-space model of the system and regards the unknown dynamics as an additive bounded disturbance. We introduce a framework for…

As the complexity of software systems rises, methods for explaining their behaviour are becoming ever-more important. When a system fails, it is critical to determine which of its components are responsible for this failure. Within the…

The notion of refinement plays an important role in software engineering. It is the basis of a stepwise development methodology in which the correctness of a system can be established by proving, or computing, that a system refines its…

We describe a novel approach for adapting an existing software model checker to perform precise runtime verification. The software under test is allowed to communicate with the wider environment (including the file system and network). The…

Communications standards are designed via committees of humans holding repeated meetings over months or even years until consensus is achieved. This includes decisions regarding the modulation and coding schemes to be supported over an air…

Serious crime modelling typically needs to be undertaken securely behind a firewall where police knowledge and capabilities can remain undisclosed. Data informing an ongoing incident is often sparse, with a large proportion of relevant data…

We give a sequential model for noninterference security including probability (but not demonic choice), thus supporting reasoning about the likelihood that high-security values might be revealed by observations of low-security activity. Our…

In a typical Event-Based Surveillance setting, a stream of web documents is continuously monitored for disease reporting. A structured representation of the disease reporting events is extracted from the raw text, and the events are then…

With the human friendly declarative intent policy expression, intent-driven network can make network management and configuration autonomous without human intervention. However, the availability and dependability of these refined policies…