Potential Cyber Threats, Vulnerabilities, and Protections of Unmanned Vehicles

This study seeks to contribute to the literature by presenting a discussion of potential cyber risks and precautionary measures concerning unmanned vehicles as a whole. In this study, Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) spoofing, jamming, password cracking, Denial-of-Service (DoS), injecting malware, and modification of firmware are identified as potential cyberattack methods against unmanned vehicles. Potential deterrents against the aforementioned cyberattack methods are suggested as well. Illustrations of such safeguards include creating an architecture of the multi-agent system, using solid-state storage components, applying distributed programming tools and techniques, implementing sophisticated encryption techniques for data storage and transmission, deploying additional sensors and systems, and comparing the data received from different sensors.

A multiparty session typing discipline for fault-tolerant event-driven distributed programming

This paper presents a formulation of multiparty session types (MPSTs) for practical fault-tolerant distributed programming. We tackle the challenges faced by session types in the context of distributed systems involving asynchronous and concurrent partial failures – such as supporting dynamic replacement of failed parties and retrying failed protocol segments in an ongoing multiparty session – in the presence of unreliable failure detection. Key to our approach is that we develop a novel model of event-driven concurrency for multiparty sessions. Inspired by real-world practices, it enables us to unify the session-typed handling of regular I/O events with failure handling and the combination of features needed to express practical fault-tolerant protocols. Moreover, the characteristics of our model allow us to prove a global progress property for well-typed processes engaged in multiple concurrent sessions, which does not hold in traditional MPST systems. To demonstrate its practicality, we implement our framework as a toolchain and runtime for Scala, and use it to specify and implement a session-typed version of the cluster management system of the industrial-strength Apache Spark data analytics framework. Our session-typed cluster manager composes with other vanilla Spark components to give a functioning Spark runtime; e.g., it can execute existing third-party Spark applications without code modification. A performance evaluation using the TPC-H benchmark shows our prototype implementation incurs an average overhead below 10%.

Actors for the Internet of Things

The actor model is a model for concurrent computation, centered around message passing between entities in a system. It is well suited for distributed programming, due to its semantics including very little guarantees or assumptions of reliability. Actor model implementations have grown more widespread in many languages. The library Akka (written in Scala) is one of the most popular actor libraries. However, Akka is missing some key features. Our goal is to create our own actor library called Aurum, which not only has these features but exhibits higher performance. The new features include easy ways to forge references, configure and launch clusters, message type translations, and the ability to inject message drops and delays into every part the application. Aurum will be implemented in Rust, a programming language designed for high performance, asynchrony and high levels of abstraction that is well suited for IoT devices. Our results show that Aurum outperforms Akka. In our benchmarks, a single server running Aurum gives three times the throughput as an equivalent Akka server, while maintaining good programmability and having features useful for IoT.

The Impact of COVID-19 in Collaborative Programming. Understanding the Needs of Undergraduate Computer Science Students

Collaborative learning activities have become a common practice in current university studies due to the implantation of the EHEA. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a radical and abrupt change in the teaching–learning model used in most universities, and in the way students’ group work is carried out. Given this new situation, our interest is focused on discovering how computer science students have approached group programming tasks. For this purpose, we have designed a cross-sectional pilot study to explore, from both social and technological points of view, how students carried out their group programming activities during the shutdown of universities, how they are doing them now, when social distance must be maintained, and what they have missed in both situations. The results of the study indicate that during the imposed confinement, the students adopted a programming model based on work division or distributed peer programming, and very few made use of synchronous distributed collaboration tools. After the lockdown, the students mostly opted for a model based on collaborative programming and there was an increased use of synchronous distributed collaboration tools. The specific communication, synchronization, and coordination functionalities they considered most useful or necessary were also analyzed. Among the desirable features included in a software for synchronous distributed programming, the students considered that having an audio-channel can be very useful and, possibly, the most agile method to communicate. The video signal is not considered as very necessary, being in many cases rather a source of distraction, while textual communication through a chat, to which they are very accustomed, is also well valued. In addition, version control and the possibility of recovering previous states of the practical projects were highly appreciated by the students, and they considered it necessary to record the individual contributions of each member of the team to the result.

Methodology for distributing information protection tasks between computer devices of automated systems based on the branch and border method

The influence of software protection on various information systems is analyzed. Using set theory, the use of computational resources for the joint solution of direct tasks and information protection tasks in an automated system is described. A hybrid implementation of computing in a CPU + GPU system is proposed. The relevance of using the branch and bound method to compile a minimum schedule of information security tasks in a hybrid multiprocessor system is considered. The features of processing data structures by various types of calculators are indicated. The computational strategies of the branch and bound method with the greatest possibility of acceleration with limited resources are analyzed. The efficiency criterion is selected, the performance indicators are considered when applying the frontal and one-sided branching strategies depending on the complexity of the calculations and the amount of occupied memory. The generalized indicator of efficiency is defined. The prospects of applying the considered method in distributed systems through distributed programming are emphasized.