Computing and Software -- Projects
Assurance of Compositions and Federations
High Confidence Software Research Initiative
The Research Computing Facility (RCF)
Computing and Software
Computing and Software maintains awareness of developments outside MITRE related to the technologies of computer architecture and engineering, computer science, software engineering and the software profession.
Assurance of Compositions and Federations
Gary Vecellio, Principal Investigator
Washington
Problem
In general, commercial composition and federation technologies are designed
to solve commercial problems such as business-to-business transactions.
While some of our customers’ problems can be mapped into a commercial
solution space, many cannot. Complicating this picture is that developing
customer-centric, often proprietary, solutions is prohibitive from the
perspective of cost, schedule, and maintenance.
Objectives The project will investigate how commercial compositional frameworks and federation technologies can be augmented so they include capabilities that will make high confidence software easier and cheaper to build, deploy, and maintain. It will demonstrate that these augmentations can take the form of mediators and monitors and that they provide a mechanism to enforce domain- and application-specific policies and properties.
Activities
The project will investigate runtime approaches that could be used to
augment or harden applications. It will formulate those approaches into
mechanisms that can be applied across various composition and federation
technologies. It will apply these mechanisms to the commercial technologies
that are being used by our customers to show improved development and
maintenance characteristics of the technologies.
Impacts
Domain- and application-specific augmentations of commercial compositional
and federation technology can be applied to several programs, including
the major C2 integration programs and DISA’s Network-Centric Enterprise
Services program. In addition, the results of this work can be used to
influence commercial products and standards.
| Presentation PDF |
High Confidence Software Research Initiative
Chuck Howell, Principal Investigator
Washington
Problem
Across MITRE, a key aspect of our sponsors' systems is an increasing reliance
on software. Both the complexity and the consequences of failure of these
software-intensive systems are steadily growing. For critical software,
our reach exceeds our grasp, yet our reach keeps increasing. For many
of the critical systems our nation increasingly depends on, software is
the weakest link.
Objectives
This project aims to improve the ability to build, assess, and sustain
complex software systems for which compelling evidence is required that
the software delivers specified services in a manner that satisfies specified
critical properties. The framework for this research is the collection
and analysis of technical evidence from multiple sources to calibrate
if confidence is justified for a given software system.
Activities
We are developing a tangible means for expressing an “assurance
case”: the documented argument for why a system can be trusted to
present identified critical characteristics. We are also developing a
testing methodology that avoids a “requirements-checkoff”
approach and instead focuses on the system’s fitness to present
those characteristics. The research concentrates on the challenges introduced
by revalidation or certification of rapidly evolving systems.
Impacts
Underlying this initiative is a vision of a self-sustaining role for MITRE
as a national resource for high confidence software. If this is a vision
and not a hallucination, the impacts include reduced risks of unexpected
software failures in critical systems, more effective exploitation of
software capabilities in modernization and transformation, and a significant
contribution to the national interest.
| Presentation PDF |
Internal SourceForge (iSF)
Deborah Ercolini, Principal Investigator
Bedford and Washington
Problem
Software development at MITRE is a nonstandard process; it varies depending
on the center, department, and/or project. Software development projects
often face a large startup cost due to the project manager and/or developers
having to establish processes and functional systems. We will help to
solve this by giving users access to a set of software development tools.
Objectives
We will pilot a SourceForge server internal to MITRE, providing a single
interface for all software development projects. Developers and project
managers will have access to software development tools and resources.
SourceForge has many capabilities, including configuration management,
bug tracking, task management, and file releases. Analysis of the pilot
will help us to understand the requirements of the MITRE software development
community.
Activities
A SourceForge server has been installed within MITRE. We have integrated
the MITRE LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) servers, allowing
a user to log on using his/her standard MII username/password. We have
also integrated MITRE mailing lists. Throughout this FY03 pilot, we will
monitor the use of the system and conduct surveys to better understand
the requirements of a software development resource.
Impacts
We believe this pilot will improve software development by providing a
single source for tools and resources. Developers and project managers
have been requesting this service for some time. If the pilot program
is successful, it will provide a consistent way of managing and accessing
software development projects, and we will be able to make recommendations
for a supported software development system.
Presentation PDF
The Research Computing Facility (RCF)
Dave Goldberg, Associate Department Head, G06A
Bedford and Washington
The Research Computing Facility (RCF) provides a distributed computing environment to the MITRE technical community. Our mission is to help MITRE researchers focus more on their research efforts, and less on their computing assets. Our solution is a highly scalable environment, largely based on the Andrew File System (AFS), that provides users a common view of their home directory, project spaces, and application suite regardless of geographic location or supported UNIX platform (currently Solaris, Irix, and Linux). We also conduct our own research into the state of the art in various information technologies to ensure that we can provide our customers with up-to-date capabilities and expertise in the management of their resources. Lessons learned from the management of the RCF are leveraged to support other MITRE work, including support for classified and DMZ-based (external to the MITRE network) systems on a consulting basis. We also provide direct support to various sponsors. In the current year, the RCF has been exploring management of large storage systems, focusing on SAN and backup as well as supporting the development of a MITRE equivalent to sourceforge.net.
| Presentation PDF |
Time-Critical Resource Management in Dynamic C2 Systems
E. Douglas Jensen, Principal Investigator
Bedford and Washington
Problem
Battle management command and control (BMC2) systems have multiple resources
and needs with numerous constraints that must often be satisfied in seconds
to minutes. Resource management is greatly complicated because the systems
and their environments are dynamic, with many uncertainties. Commanders
need dependable indicators and strong assurances about system behavior.
Objectives
We will help fill the void between traditional real-time resource management
and traditional any-time planning and decision-making for machine-to-machine
resource management in dynamic BMC2 systems having seconds-to-minutes
timeframes. We will apply the theory, methodologies, and tools of utility
theory to seek a formal basis, methodology, and proof-of-concept software
tool for time/utility function time constraints.
Activities
In collaboration with researchers and a COTS vendor, we will seek a formalism
for our time-critical resource management by adapting and extending work
from the fields of constraint-based scheduling, utility functions, and
machine scheduling. We will derive a methodology and modify a COTS software
tool. We will demonstrate the results in a realistic BMC2 application.
Impacts
Resource management in most BMC2 systems – and hence software cost
and the system’s cost-effectiveness – usually suffer from
insufficient consideration of timeliness, due in large part to inadequate
formal bases, methodology, and software tools. This problem is increasingly
critical as shorter timeframes of opportunity necessitate automated resource
management, and increasingly difficult to solve as warfare becomes more
network-centric.
| Presentation PDF |
Understanding Object-Oriented Software
Melissa Chase, Principal Investigator
Bedford and Washington
Problem
While object-oriented approaches to software development promise to provide
solutions that are faster, cheaper, and reusable, the software delivered
contains enough indirection (via inheritance and polymorphism) to make
it more difficult for analysts to understand object-oriented versions
than strict procedural versions. Through understanding object-oriented
code, we can assess qualities such as performance and security, support
iterative development, and support reuse.
Objectives
The work of the design pattern software-engineering community provides
us with descriptions of best practices, applicability conditions, and
consequences of use for specific designs. Hence, we will develop the capability
to automatically recognize use of design patterns through static reverse
engineering techniques. Moreover, we will develop capabilities to reason
about concomitant design rationale and software qualities.
Activities
We are using commercial integrated development environments to extract
data on class interactions. First, we will concentrate on recognizing
structural patterns and validating recognition results by examining software
that contains intentional, documented use of patterns. Second, we will
broaden this to cover architectural patterns and reasoning about pattern
applicability conditions. Third, we will tackle the interplay among multiple
pattern types within a single program.
Impacts
Our results will have direct impact on supporting software acquisition.
We will be able to document legacy and newly developed software and to
perform architectural compliance tasks. This work is also a prerequisite
for analysis of static software vulnerability and malicious code. We will
connect with projects that have an anticipated need for this within the
next fiscal year.
| Presentation PDF |