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Section: Partnerships and Cooperations
National Initiatives
AnaStaSec
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Others partners: Airbus France (France), AMOSSYS (France), CEA LIST (France), Inria Rennes-Bretagne Atlantique (France), TrustInSoft (France)
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See also: http://www.di.ens.fr/ feret/anastasec/
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Abstract: An emerging structure in our information processing-based society is the notion of trusted complex systems interacting via heterogeneous networks with an open, mostly untrusted world. This view characterises a wide variety of systems ranging from the information system of a company to the connected components of a private house, all of which have to be connected with the outside.
It is in particular the case for some aircraft-embedded computer systems, which communicate with the ground through untrusted communication media. Besides, the increasing demand for new capabilities, such as enhanced on-board connectivity, e.g. using mobile devices, together with the need for cost reduction, leads to more integrated and interconnected systems. For instance, modern aircrafts embed a large number of computer systems, from safety-critical cockpit avionics to passenger entertainment. Some systems meet both safety and security requirements. Despite thorough segregation of subsystems and networks, some shared communication resources raise the concern of possible intrusions.
Some techniques have been developed and still need to be investigated to ensure security and confidentiality properties of such systems. Moreover, most of them are model-based techniques operating only at architectural level and provide no guarantee on the actual implementations. However, most security incidents are due to attackers exploiting subtle implementation-level software vulnerabilities. Systems should therefore be analyzed at software level as well (i.e. source or executable code), in order to provide formal assurance that security properties indeed hold for real systems.
Because of the size of such systems, and considering that they are evolving entities, the only economically viable alternative is to perform automatic analyses. Such analyses of security and confidentiality properties have never been achieved on large-scale systems where security properties interact with other software properties, and even the mapping between high-level models of the systems and the large software base implementing them has never been done and represents a great challenge. The goal of this project is to develop the new concepts and technologies necessary to meet such a challenge.
The project AnaStaSec project will allow for the formal verification of security properties of software-intensive embedded systems, using automatic static analysis techniques at different levels of representation: models, source and binary codes. Among expected outcomes of the project will be a set of prototype tools, able to deal with realistic large systems and the elaboration of industrial security evaluation processes, based on static analysis.
REPAS
The project REPAS, Reliable and Privacy-Aware Software Systems via Bisimulation Metrics (coordination Catuscia Palamidessi, Inria Saclay), aims at investigating quantitative notions and tools for proving program correctness and protecting privacy, focusing on bisimulation metrics, the natural extension of bisimulation on quantitative systems. A key application is to develop mechanisms to protect the privacy of users when their location traces are collected. Partners: Inria (Comete, Focus), ENS Cachan, ENS Lyon, University of Bologna.
VeriFault
This was a PEPS project for one year, coordinated by Cezara Drăgoi, on the topic of fault-tolerant distributed algorithms. These algorithms are notoriously difficult to implement correctly, due to asynchronous communication and the occurrence of faults, such as the network dropping messages or computers crashing. Although fault-tolerant algorithms are at the core of critical applications, there are no automated verification techniques that can deal with their complexity. Due to the complexity distributed systems have reached, we believe it is no longer realistic nor efficient to assume that high level specifications can be proved when development and verification are two disconnected steps in the software production process. Therefore we propose to introduce a domain specific language that has a high-level control structure which focuses on the algorithmic aspects rather than on low-level network and timer code, and makes programs amendable to automated verification.
TGFSYSBIO
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Title: Microznvironment and cancer: regulation of TGF- signaling
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Others partners: Inria Paris (France), Inria Rennes-Bretagne Atlantique (France),
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Abstract: Most cases of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) develop in cirrhosis resulting from chronic liver diseases and the Transforming Growth Factor (TGF-) is widely regarded as both the major pro-fibrogenic agent and a critical inducer of tumor progression and invasion. Targeting the deleterious effects of TGF- without affecting its physiological role is the common goal of therapeutic strategies. However, identification of specific targets remains challenging because of the pleiotropic effects of TGF-β linked to the complex nature of its extracellular activation and signaling networks.
Our project proposes a systemic approach aiming at to identifying the potential targets that regulate the shift from anti- to pro-oncogenic effects of TGF-. To that purpose, we will combine a rule-based model (Kappa language) to describe extracellular TGF-beta activation and large-scale state-transition based (Cadbiom formalism) model for TGF--dependent intracellular signaling pathways. The multi-scale integrated model will be enriched with a large-scale analysis of liver tissues using shotgun proteomics to characterize protein networks from tumor microenvironment whose remodeling is responsible for extracellular activation of TGF-. The trajectories and upstream regulators of the final model will be analyzed with symbolic model checking techniques and abstract interpretation combined with causality analysis. Candidates will be classified with semantic-based approaches and symbolic bi-clustering technics. All efforts must ultimately converge to experimental validations of hypotheses and we will use our hepatic cellular models (HCC cell lines and hepatic stellate cells) to screen inhibitors on the behaviors of TGF- signal.
The expected results are the first model of extracellular and intracellular TGF- system that might permit to analyze the behaviors of TGF- activity during the course of liver tumor progression and to identify new biomarkers and potential therapeutic targets.