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Each year The MITRE Corporation conducts a vast amount of technical research for our sponsors and customers. Some of MITRE's most innovative research in emerging technologies occurs within the MITRE Technology Program (MTP) and is showcased at the annual MITRE Technology Symposium. Above John Warren talks to Symposium guests about his project.

Can we make Jini™ systems more reliable on the battlefield?

One research project at MITRE, Assurance Mechanisms for Dynamically Composed Jini™ Systems, focuses on examining the tools and techniques that can make Jini, a Java-based mobile code architecture, more reliable on the battlefield. John Warren is the Principal Investigator of the project.

"A couple of years ago I was working with a colleague on a research project on Mobile Computing Architectures. Shortly thereafter, I started working on finding a toolset to write safer and more robust service-based systems," explains Warren. "The problem is a lack of information security in emerging mobile code architectures like Jini. The Jini technology has great potential for the military—it's a dynamic technology that enables field forces to quickly add new hardware and software without having to reconfigure the entire network. Unfortunately, the Jini architecture does not provide any means to ensure that the services will function predictably and correctly.

"I'm very interested in the Jini technology because I know that protocol independent technologies like this are an inevitable part of the future," he adds. "What intrigued me was 'how can I make this break?' If we move the code to a different environment, will it break? If so, then we need to find ways to make the technology more robust. That's what I'm looking at in my project: what types of tools and techniques already exist or can be augmented to write safe and robust service-based systems?

"One of the best aspects of working at MITRE is having the intellectual freedom to pursue emerging technologies related to your work," says Warren. "MITRE gives its staff a tremendous amount of support to explore new technologies. In my case, MITRE Chief Engineer Chuck Howell has been a staunch advocate for augmenting Software Quality Assurance technologies—he inspired me to pursue this line of research."

"The opportunity to conduct independent research was one of the things that attracted me to MITRE when I was a student at George Mason University," continues Warren. "I enjoyed my internship at MITRE so much that after graduation I joined the company full-time."

NOTE: Jini™ is a trademark of Sun Microsystems.