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Burns, Luanne

Publications and source records attributed to Burns, Luanne.

Introduction: Cybersecurity and Software Assurance Minitrack

Modern society is dependent on software systems of remarkable scope and complexity. Yet methods for assuring their security and functionality have not kept pace. The result is persistent compromises and failures despite best efforts. Cybersecurity methods must work together for situational awareness, attack prevention and detection, threat attribution, minimization of consequences, and attack recovery. Because defective software cannot be secure, assurance technologies must play a central role in cybersecurity approaches. There is increasing recognition of the need for rigorous methods for cybersecurity and software assurance. The goal of this minitrack is to develop science foundations, technologies, and practices that can improve the security and dependability of complex systems.

Burns, Luanne↗

Automated Behavior Computation for Software Analysis and Validation

Software systems can exhibit massive numbers of possi-ble execution paths, and even the most comprehensive testing can exercise only a small fraction of these. It is no surprise that systems experience errors and vulnerabilities in field use when most executions are untested. While the problem seems intractable at the execution level, it may not be so at the functional semantics level. Structured programs are expressed in a finite hierarchy of control structures, each of which corresponds to a mathematical function or relation. A correctness theo-rem defines transformation of these structures from procedural logic into non-procedural, as-built specifications of behavior. These specifications enumerate behavior for all circumstances of use and cover the behav-ior space. Automation of these computations affords a new means for validating software functionality and security properties. This paper describes theory and implementation for loop behavior computation in pa-ticular, and illustrates use of an automated behavior computation system to validate a miniature program with and without embedded malware.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗