Security as a System-Level Constraint

Google Tech Talks June 4, 2008 ABSTRACT The essence of system-level design is the need to concurrently consider information from multiple engineering domains across multiple subsystems to assess holistic system properties. The systems engineer is responsible for bringing together all facets of a system for evaluation of system-level requirements and to aid in understanding system impacts of local design decisions. System-level security, encompassing issues such as confidentiality of information, integrity and authenticity of information sources, and availability of critical services, is one of many interacting system-level issues that must be addressed. To evaluate system-level security, we must treat security requirements as system-level properties, addressing their satisfaction in the same manner as traditional system-level issues such as power consumption or safety. Specifically, we must provide support for representing system-level security requirements; composing and integrating information from heterogeneous models; and establishing dependencies between models to assess the security health of a complete system. This talk overviews work surrounding the the Rosetta system-level design language with emphasis on efforts to specify, synthesize and verify software defined radios. Speaker: Perry Alexander Dr. Perry Alexander is a Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department and Director of the Information and Telecommunication Technology Center's Computer Systems Design Laboratory at The University of Kansas. His research interests include system-level modeling, security and assurance, design languages, heterogeneous specification, language semantics, and embedded systems. He received the BSEE and BSCS in 1986, the MSEE in 1988, and the PhD in 1992 all from The University of Kansas. From September 1992 through July 1999 he was a faculty member and director of The Knowledge-Based Software Engineering Laboratory in the Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science department at The University of Cincinnati. He is the chief architect of the Rosetta system specification language and author of System-Level Design using Rosetta published by Morgan Kaufmann in 2006. Dr. Alexander has published over 90 refereed research papers and has presented numerous invited presentations. He has won 15 teaching awards, was named a Kemper Teaching Fellow and won the ASEE Midwest Region Dean's Award for Teaching Excellence in 2003. He is a Senior Member of ACM, Sigma Xi, and a Senior Member of IEEE where he served as Chair of the Engineering of Computer-Based Systems Engineering Technical Committee and currently serves as Chair of the DASC P1699 Rosetta Working Group.