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Sam Malek

Possible papers associated with this exact author name in Arrow. This page groups case-insensitive exact name matches and is not a full identity disambiguation profile.

3 papers

1 author row

TAAS Journal 2016 Journal Article

Inferring Software Component Interaction Dependencies for Adaptation Support

Naeem Esfahani
Eric Yuan
Kyle R. Canavera
Sam Malek

A self-managing software system should be able to monitor and analyze its runtime behavior and make adaptation decisions accordingly to meet certain desirable objectives. Traditional software adaptation techniques and recent “models@runtime” approaches usually require an a priori model for a system’s dynamic behavior. Oftentimes the model is difficult to define and labor-intensive to maintain, and tends to get out of date due to adaptation and architecture decay. We propose an alternative approach that does not require defining the system’s behavior model beforehand, but instead involves mining software component interactions from system execution traces to build a probabilistic usage model, which is in turn used to analyze, plan, and execute adaptations. In this article, we demonstrate how such an approach can be realized and effectively used to address a variety of adaptation concerns. In particular, we describe the details of one application of this approach for safely applying dynamic changes to a running software system without creating inconsistencies. We also provide an overview of two other applications of the approach, identifying potentially malicious (abnormal) behavior for self-protection, and improving deployment of software components in a distributed setting for performance self-optimization. Finally, we report on our experiments with engineering self-management features in an emergency deployment system using the proposed mining approach.

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TAAS Journal 2014 Journal Article

A Systematic Survey of Self-Protecting Software Systems

Eric Yuan
Naeem Esfahani
Sam Malek

Self-protecting software systems are a class of autonomic systems capable of detecting and mitigating security threats at runtime. They are growing in importance, as the stovepipe static methods of securing software systems have been shown to be inadequate for the challenges posed by modern software systems. Self-protection, like other self-* properties, allows the system to adapt to the changing environment through autonomic means without much human intervention, and can thereby be responsive, agile, and cost effective. While existing research has made significant progress towards autonomic and adaptive security, gaps and challenges remain. This article presents a significant extension of our preliminary study in this area. In particular, unlike our preliminary study, here we have followed a systematic literature review process, which has broadened the scope of our study and strengthened the validity of our conclusions. By proposing and applying a comprehensive taxonomy to classify and characterize the state-of-the-art research in this area, we have identified key patterns, trends and challenges in the existing approaches, which reveals a number of opportunities that will shape the focus of future research efforts.

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TAAS Journal 2012 Journal Article

FORMS

Danny Weyns
Sam Malek
Jesper Andersson

The challenges of pervasive and mobile computing environments, which are highly dynamic and unpredictable, have motivated the development of self-adaptive software systems. Although noteworthy successes have been achieved on many fronts, the construction of such systems remains significantly more challenging than traditional systems. We argue this is partially because researchers and practitioners have been struggling with the lack of a precise vocabulary for describing and reasoning about the key architectural characteristics of self-adaptive systems. Further exacerbating the situation is the fact that existing frameworks and guidelines do not provide an encompassing perspective of the different types of concerns in this setting. In this article, we present a comprehensive reference model, entitled FOrmal Reference Model for Self-adaptation (FORMS), that targets both issues. FORMS provides rigor in the manner such systems can be described and reasoned about. It consists of a small number of formally specified modeling elements that correspond to the key concerns in the design of self-adaptive software systems, and a set of relationships that guide their composition. We demonstrate FORMS's ability to precisely describe and reason about the architectural characteristics of distributed self-adaptive software systems through its application to several existing systems. FORMS's expressive power gives it a potential for documenting reusable architectural solutions (e.g., architectural patterns) to commonly encountered problems in this area.

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