skip to main content
OSTI.GOV title logo U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Title: Dynamic analysis methods for detecting anomalies in asynchronously interacting systems

Technical Report ·
DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1204104· OSTI ID:1204104
 [1];  [1];  [2]
  1. Sandia National Lab. (SNL-CA), Livermore, CA (United States)
  2. Max Planck Society, Garching (Germany). Max Planck Inst. for Mathematics

Detecting modifications to digital system designs, whether malicious or benign, is problematic due to the complexity of the systems being analyzed. Moreover, static analysis techniques and tools can only be used during the initial design and implementation phases to verify safety and liveness properties. It is computationally intractable to guarantee that any previously verified properties still hold after a system, or even a single component, has been produced by a third-party manufacturer. In this paper we explore new approaches for creating a robust system design by investigating highly-structured computational models that simplify verification and analysis. Our approach avoids the need to fully reconstruct the implemented system by incorporating a small verification component that dynamically detects for deviations from the design specification at run-time. The first approach encodes information extracted from the original system design algebraically into a verification component. During run-time this component randomly queries the implementation for trace information and verifies that no design-level properties have been violated. If any deviation is detected then a pre-specified fail-safe or notification behavior is triggered. Our second approach utilizes a partitioning methodology to view liveness and safety properties as a distributed decision task and the implementation as a proposed protocol that solves this task. Thus the problem of verifying safety and liveness properties is translated to that of verifying that the implementation solves the associated decision task. We develop upon results from distributed systems and algebraic topology to construct a learning mechanism for verifying safety and liveness properties from samples of run-time executions.

Research Organization:
Sandia National Lab. (SNL-CA), Livermore, CA (United States); Max Planck Institute for Mathematics,, Bonn, Germany
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)
DOE Contract Number:
AC04-94AL85000
OSTI ID:
1204104
Report Number(s):
SAND2014-1533; 505012
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

Similar Records

Detecting and Blocking Network Attacks at Ultra High Speeds
Technical Report · Mon Nov 29 00:00:00 EST 2010 · OSTI ID:1204104

Static analysis of programs with application to malicious code detection
Technical Report · Thu Oct 01 00:00:00 EDT 1992 · OSTI ID:1204104

Static analysis of programs with application to malicious code detection
Technical Report · Thu Oct 01 00:00:00 EDT 1992 · OSTI ID:1204104

Related Subjects