Papers
SCADA Statistics Monitoring Using the Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana)
The Industrial Controls and Safety systems group at CERN, in collaboration with other groups, has developed and currently maintains around 200 controls applications that include domains such as LHC magnet protection, cryogenics and electrical network supervision systems. Millions of value changes and alarms from many devices are archived to a centralised Oracle database but it is not easy to obtain high-level statistics from such an archive.
Dependence Communities in Source Code
The concept of community structure arises from the analysis of social networks in sociology. Community structure can be found in many real world graphs other than social networks. Recently, efficient community detection algorithms have been developed which can cope with very large graphs with millions of nodes and potentially billions of edges. So, for the first time, there is the potential for investigating communities in real industrial-strength software at the statement level.
Using Maximal Slices as a Solution to the 'Output Variable' Problem for Calculating Slice-Based Cohesion Metrics
Software metrics are widely used to quantify software quality; cohesion is one such metric. It is a measure of the 'inter-relatedness' of code.
A Survey of Static Software Watermarking
Software theft, also known as software piracy, is the act of copying a legitimate application and illegally distributing that software, either free or for profit. The global revenue loss due to software piracy was estimated to be more than $50 billion in 2009. Watermarks can be classified as either static or dynamic. Static watermarks are embedded in the code and/or data of a computer program, whereas dynamic watermarking techniques store a watermark in a program's execution state. In this paper, we present a brief survey of the proposed static watermarking techniques, including a brief explanation of each technique concluding with directions for future work.
A Survey of Software Watermarking by Code Re-Ordering
We survey the proposed software watermarking algorithms based on code re-ordering. This family of static watermarks use semantics-preserving transformations to encode a watermark in a permutation of the existing code. We describe the existing techniques and highlight the short-comings of these algorithms, namely that they are highly susceptible to semantics preserving transformations attacks.
An Evaluation of Current Java Bytecode Decompilers
Decompilation of Java bytecode is the act of transforming Java bytecode to Java source code. Although easier than that of decompilation of machine code, problems still arise in Java bytecode decompilation. These include type inference of local variables and exception-handling.
Since the last such evaluation (2003) several new commercial, free and open-source Java decompilers have appeared and some of the older ones have been updated.
MPhil Transfer Report
Decompilation of Java bytecode is the act of transforming Java bytecode to Java source code. Although easier than that of decompilation of machine code, problems still arise in Java bytecode decompilation. These include type inference of local variables and exception-handling.
A Survey of Software Watermarking by Register Allocation (for Java Bytecode)
In this paper, we examine register allocation based software watermarking algorithms; these algorithms are constraint-based static software watermarking techniques. Figure 1 shows the evolution of this family of algorithms on which we report previous findings, describe some recent additions (including a correction to a published algorithm) and conclude by suggesting a direction for future work.
An Evaluation of Static Java Bytecode Watermarks
The rise in the use of the Internet and bytecode languages such as Java bytecode and Microsoft's Common Intermediate Language have made copying, decompiling and disassembling software easier. The global revenue loss due to software piracy was estimated to be more than $50 billion in 2008. Watermarking is a technique which attempts to protect software by inserting copyright notices or unique indentifiers into software to prove ownership.
Static Source Code Analysis Tools and their Application to the Detection of Plagiarism in Java Programs
This project develops a system for detecting plagiarism in sets of student assignments written in Java. Plagiarism is viewed as a form of code obfuscation where students deliberately perform semantics preserving transformations of an original working version to pass it of as their own. In order to detect such obfuscations we assume we have a set of programs in which we attempt to find transformations that have been applied. We investigate tools for static analysis and transformation of Java programs to build a system for plagiarism detection.
Artificial Ants: Simulating Ant Behaviour and Investigating Applications In Computing
Ants are excellent route finders, with the ability to find the shortest path between their nest and a food source, by using pheromone trail clues to organize themselves collectively. By applying behaviour observed in ant colonies to the field of computing, these ant-based techniques can provide a base for network routing algorithms, as well as algorithms to solve graph problems such as the travelling salesman problem.
