Chapters from books (Computer Science)

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/2263/32437

Browse

Recent Submissions

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Towards a generic design for general-purpose sensor network nodes
    (SciTePress, 2010) Gruner, Stefan
    The key to mature and efficient industrial software engineering is standardisation more than an aggressive struggle for innovation only for the sake of its own. This is assumption is also held for the area of sensor networks development, which is becoming an increasingly important field at the interface between software and hardware engineering. This short position paper proposes and outlines a generic design for the nodes of such sensor networks, which could be used in the future as the basis of almost any conceivable sensor network application. On such a basis of generic standardisation, the development of specific and particular sensor network applications will then be mainly a matter of hardware-independent programming with APIs, as it is already well known in the classical domain of operating systems in ordinary desktop PCs.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Model-based passive testing of safety-critical components
    (CRC Press, 2011) Gruner, Stefan; Watson, Bruce William
    Passive testing is a complementary technique to active testing. For some types of systems, for example dynamic or adaptive distributed systems which are able to re-configure themselves at runtime in response to changes in their environments, exhaustive active testing before deployment is either theoretically impossible or practically not feasible. For such types of systems the additional application of the technique of passive testing is recommendable. However, a comprehensive theory and taxonomy of methods and techniques for model-based passive testing does –as far as we know– not yet exist and is from today’s perspective still very much a topic for future research in this domain. For this reason the presentation of the topic in this chapter is very much example-based such as to provide the reader with some first intuitions about what model-based passive testing is, what kinds of techniques could be used to implement it, and what could be some typical application scenarios for model-based passive testing in the domains of software systems, hardware systems, as well as embedded software+hardware systems.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Abstraction, Refinement, Enrichment
    (Shaker Verlag, Aachen, Germany, 2013) Gruner, Stefan
    In the no longer existing South African journal Quaestiones Informaticae, "An Approach to Defining Abstractions, Refinements and Enrichments" was published by Derrick Kourie more than twenty years ago. At some occasion, about two years ago, Derrick Kourie had asked and encouraged me to review his original topics, such as to re-construct and re-present them from a different perspective. In this festschrift chapter, in honour of Derrick Kourie's 65th birthday, I outline the results of my attempt at fulfilling Derrick Kourie's collegial request. For this purpose I shall first recapitulate the key concepts of Kourie's original paper, since that paper has more or less fallen into oblivion and cannot be easily retrieved from the public domain any more. Thereafter Kourie's notions of abstraction, refinement and enrichment are re-defined in a different (more classical) theoretical framework. Finally those notions are contextualised with respect to the related notion of retrenchment developed since the mid-1990s by Banach, Poppleton, et al
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    On the Scientific Maturity of Digital Forensics Research
    (Springer-Verlag, 2013) Gruner, Stefan; Olivier, Martin S.
    In this paper we transfer a well-known grade schema of scientific maturity from the domain of software engineering into the domain of digital forensics research. On the basis of this maturity schema and its grades we classify the current state of maturity in the research field of digital forensics, and we argue for more efforts towards higher levels of scientificness in this still new field of research.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Log File Analysis with Context-Free Grammars
    (Springer-Verlag, 2013) Gruner, Stefan; Bosman, Gregory
    Classical ways of intrusion analysis from textual communication log files are either AI-based (such as by combinations of data mining with various techniques of machine learning), or they are based on regular expressions (such as the scanners implemented in the CISCO boxes). Whereas AI-based heuristics are not analytically exact, methods based on regular expressions do not reach very far in Chomsky's hierarchy of languages. In this short chapter we describe work in progress on the topic of parsing traces of network traffic with context-free grammars. "Green" grammars describe acceptable log files, whereas "red" grammars represent already known specific patterns of intrusion attempts. This technique can complement or augment the aready existing AI-approaches with additional precision. Analytically it is also more powerful than CISCO's technique on the basis of regular expressions.