Dr. Sven Peldszus

 

by arrangement


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Research Subjects

Today’s software systems tend to be used on a long-term basis, are highly interconnected, share many common parts and often process security-critical data, so that keeping up with ever-changing security precautions, attacks and mitigations is vital for preserving a system’s security. Model-based system development enables us to address security issues already in the early phases of the software design, as in UML models. The continuous changes in the security assumptions and the design of software systems —for instance, due to structural decay— have to be reflected in both the system models (e.g. UML models) and the system’s implementation (including program models). The detection of which change is necessary where has currently to be performed manually by developers.

My main research directions are to study approaches for automatically detecting and performing necessary changes on a single representation of the system and to keep all other representations synchronized with this changed representation. Allowing developers to develop systems in a model-based manner and dealing with the structural decay of long-living systems.

Therefore, I am proposing a model-based approach in which design models (e.g. specified in UML), source code (e.g. written in Java), and a program model (PM) for performing sophisticated analyses are continuously synchronized for covering the different phases of software development. Security, as well as variability, is introduced into the different artifacts as annotations. E.g. on UML models we can the UMLsec profile proposed by Jürjens for security annotations and for variability annotations Antenna preprocessor-like statements as defined in Antenna.