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The structures for the expression of fault-tolerance provisions into the application software are the central topic of this paper. Structuring techniques answer the questions "How to incorporate fault-tolerance in the application layer of a…

Emergent design failures are ubiquitous in complex systems, and often arise when system elements cluster. Approaches to systematically reduce clustering could improve a design's resilience, but reducing clustering is difficult if it is…

Fixing software faults contributes significantly to the cost of software maintenance and evolution. Techniques for reducing these costs require datasets of software faults, as well as an understanding of the faults, for optimal testing and…

Two large, open source software systems are analyzed from the vantage point of complex adaptive systems theory. For both systems, the full dependency graphs are constructed and their properties are shown to be consistent with the assumption…

The problem of reliability of a large distributed system is analyzed via a new mathematical model. A typical framework is a system where a set of files are duplicated on several data servers. When one of these servers breaks down, all…

Software reliability models are an important tool in quality management and release planning. There is a large number of different models that often exhibit strengths in different areas. This paper proposes a model that is based on a…

Complex networks are ubiquitous: a cell, the human brain, a group of people and the Internet are all examples of interconnected many-body systems characterized by macroscopic properties that cannot be trivially deduced from those of their…

Providing feedback is an integral part of teaching. Most open online courses on programming make use of automated grading systems to support programming assignments and give real-time feedback. These systems usually rely on test results to…

The goal of this paper is to study and define the concept of "antifragile software". For this, I start from Taleb's statement that antifragile systems love errors, and discuss whether traditional software dependability fits into this class.…

With the increasing complexity of computing systems, complete hardware reliability can no longer be guaranteed. We need, however, to ensure overall system reliability. One of the most important features of artificial neural networks is…

Each year, thousands of software vulnerabilities are discovered and reported to the public. Unpatched known vulnerabilities are a significant security risk. It is imperative that software vendors quickly provide patches once vulnerabilities…

Background: Widespread use of third-party libraries makes ecosystems like Node Package Manager (npm) critical to modern software development. However, this interconnected chain of dependencies also creates challenges: bugs in one library…

Most of the current software security analysis tools assess vulnerabilities in isolation. However, sophisticated software supply chain security threats often stem from cascaded vulnerability and security weakness chains that span dependent…

Software systems are composed of many interacting elements. A natural way to abstract over software systems is to model them as graphs. In this paper we consider software dependency graphs of object-oriented software and we study one…

Embedded software is developed under the assumption that hardware execution is always correct. Fault attacks break and exploit that assumption. Through the careful introduction of targeted faults, an adversary modifies the control-flow or…

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…

Multilayer networked systems are ubiquitous in nature and engineering, and the robustness of these systems against failures is of great interest. A main line of theoretical pursuit has been percolation induced cascading failures, where…

We investigate the failure mechanisms of load sharing complex systems. The system is composed of multiple nodes or components whose failures are determined based on the interaction of their respective strengths and loads (or capacity and…

In order to plan for failure recovery, the designers of cloud systems need to understand how their system can potentially fail. Unfortunately, analyzing the failure behavior of such systems can be very difficult and time-consuming, due to…

In this paper we study the problem of how resilient networks are to node faults. Specifically, we investigate the question of how many faults a network can sustain so that it still contains a large (i.e. linear-sized) connected component…