Journal of Computer Virology and Hacking Techniques, 2021
When designing Wireless Sensor Networks it is important to analyze their security risks and provi... more When designing Wireless Sensor Networks it is important to analyze their security risks and provide adequate solutions for protecting them from malicious attacks. Unfortunately, perfect security cannot be achieved, for performance reasons. Therefore, designers have to devise security priorities, and select security mechanisms accordingly. However, in the early stages of the design process, the concrete effects of security attacks on the system may not be clearly identified. In this paper, we propose a framework that integrates formal verification and network simulation for enabling designers to evaluate the effects of attacks, identify possible security mechanisms, and evaluate their effectiveness, since design time. Formal methods are used to build the abstract model of the application, together with a set of attacks, and to state properties of general validity. The simulator measures the impact of the attacks in terms of common network parameters, like energy consumption or comput...
Wireless sensor networks enable a wealth of new applications in areas such as military, medical, ... more Wireless sensor networks enable a wealth of new applications in areas such as military, medical, environmental, transportation, smart city, and so on. In many of these scenarios, we need to measure in a secure way the positions of the sensors. Existing range-based techniques for secure positioning require a burdensome infrastructure, with many fixed anchors. Reducing the infrastructure would reduce deployment cost and foster the adoption of secure positioning solutions in wireless sensor networks. In this article, we propose SPEM, a secure positioning system based on multilateration and ultra-wideband (UWB) distance bounding protocols. The key idea behind SPEM is to leverage the low probability that an adversary has of controlling enlargement attacks against UWB. We estimate such a probability by a thorough study and signal-level simulations of the UWB physical layer. We test SPEM both in a simulated environment and in a real indoor environment using real UWB transceivers. We show t...
An application package which allows the user to explore the possibility of hiding communication l... more An application package which allows the user to explore the possibility of hiding communication latencies in message-passing multiprocessors is examined. The package is a neural network simulator for transputer-based machines. Simply by modifying few high-level directives in a configuration file, heuristic strategies for fully overlapping communication delays with internal computation, can be easily explored. The neural network model and the software architecture are described. An example is discussed.< >
We present Ulisse, a distributed single address space system being developed at the University of... more We present Ulisse, a distributed single address space system being developed at the University of Pisa. Ulisse has a symmetric, peer-to-peer architecture, is resilient to certain types of node and network failures, and supports a form of application-controlled approach to memory management. A set of mechanisms make it possible to explicitly control page caching and the page movements across the storage hierarchy, thereby allowing application programs to implement specific memory management strategies, including page ...
We consider the problem of developing reliable services to be deployed in partitionable asynchron... more We consider the problem of developing reliable services to be deployed in partitionable asynchronous distributed systems. What makes this task difficult is guaranteeing the consistency of shared state despite failures and recoveries. While process groups and view-synchronous communication can significantly simplify reasoning about failures in such systems, they are insufficient for dealing with recoveries and merging of partitions after repairs. We define shared state reconciliation as the abstract characterization of recovery and show how view-synchronous communication can be enriched in order to solve it simply and systematically
Large-scale systems spanning geographically distant sites are potentially appropriate environment... more Large-scale systems spanning geographically distant sites are potentially appropriate environments for distributed applications supporting collaboration. In this paper, we examine the possibility of using such systems as repositories for replicated files to facilitate lowlatency data sharing. Asynchrony in communication and computation, complex combinations of site and communication failures, and in particular, network partitions that characterize these systems make the design of algorithms to operate on them a difficult task. We show that ...
Journal of Computer Virology and Hacking Techniques, 2021
When designing Wireless Sensor Networks it is important to analyze their security risks and provi... more When designing Wireless Sensor Networks it is important to analyze their security risks and provide adequate solutions for protecting them from malicious attacks. Unfortunately, perfect security cannot be achieved, for performance reasons. Therefore, designers have to devise security priorities, and select security mechanisms accordingly. However, in the early stages of the design process, the concrete effects of security attacks on the system may not be clearly identified. In this paper, we propose a framework that integrates formal verification and network simulation for enabling designers to evaluate the effects of attacks, identify possible security mechanisms, and evaluate their effectiveness, since design time. Formal methods are used to build the abstract model of the application, together with a set of attacks, and to state properties of general validity. The simulator measures the impact of the attacks in terms of common network parameters, like energy consumption or comput...
Wireless sensor networks enable a wealth of new applications in areas such as military, medical, ... more Wireless sensor networks enable a wealth of new applications in areas such as military, medical, environmental, transportation, smart city, and so on. In many of these scenarios, we need to measure in a secure way the positions of the sensors. Existing range-based techniques for secure positioning require a burdensome infrastructure, with many fixed anchors. Reducing the infrastructure would reduce deployment cost and foster the adoption of secure positioning solutions in wireless sensor networks. In this article, we propose SPEM, a secure positioning system based on multilateration and ultra-wideband (UWB) distance bounding protocols. The key idea behind SPEM is to leverage the low probability that an adversary has of controlling enlargement attacks against UWB. We estimate such a probability by a thorough study and signal-level simulations of the UWB physical layer. We test SPEM both in a simulated environment and in a real indoor environment using real UWB transceivers. We show t...
An application package which allows the user to explore the possibility of hiding communication l... more An application package which allows the user to explore the possibility of hiding communication latencies in message-passing multiprocessors is examined. The package is a neural network simulator for transputer-based machines. Simply by modifying few high-level directives in a configuration file, heuristic strategies for fully overlapping communication delays with internal computation, can be easily explored. The neural network model and the software architecture are described. An example is discussed.< >
We present Ulisse, a distributed single address space system being developed at the University of... more We present Ulisse, a distributed single address space system being developed at the University of Pisa. Ulisse has a symmetric, peer-to-peer architecture, is resilient to certain types of node and network failures, and supports a form of application-controlled approach to memory management. A set of mechanisms make it possible to explicitly control page caching and the page movements across the storage hierarchy, thereby allowing application programs to implement specific memory management strategies, including page ...
We consider the problem of developing reliable services to be deployed in partitionable asynchron... more We consider the problem of developing reliable services to be deployed in partitionable asynchronous distributed systems. What makes this task difficult is guaranteeing the consistency of shared state despite failures and recoveries. While process groups and view-synchronous communication can significantly simplify reasoning about failures in such systems, they are insufficient for dealing with recoveries and merging of partitions after repairs. We define shared state reconciliation as the abstract characterization of recovery and show how view-synchronous communication can be enriched in order to solve it simply and systematically
Large-scale systems spanning geographically distant sites are potentially appropriate environment... more Large-scale systems spanning geographically distant sites are potentially appropriate environments for distributed applications supporting collaboration. In this paper, we examine the possibility of using such systems as repositories for replicated files to facilitate lowlatency data sharing. Asynchrony in communication and computation, complex combinations of site and communication failures, and in particular, network partitions that characterize these systems make the design of algorithms to operate on them a difficult task. We show that ...
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Papers by Gianluca Dini