TSF Group

Head: Karama Kanoun
Secretary : Sonia De Sousa

Special tribute to Jean-Claude LAPRIE


The members of the group would like to pay a special tribute
   to Jean-Claude, founder of the group, who left us prematurely   
on October 17, 2010, at the age of 65.
We dedicate a special page to him.


The work of the group focuses on dependability of computing systems, i.e., the ability to deliver a service that can be justifiably trusted. It encompasses the properties of availability, reliability, integrity, confidentiality, maintainability, safety, as well as security.

Research topics


Mobility Evolvability
and autonomy 		Openness Reactivity
Architecture
(Fault prevention
and Fault tolerance)
 Geoprivacy


Mobility-explicit computing models 		Self-organizing fault-tolerant nanochips  
 
On-line adaptation of fault tolerance software

Defenses for autonomously-adapting systems   		Privacy protection

Operating system kernel protection

Virtualization and diversification

Protection of critical infrastructures

Service oriented applications 		Early error detection for real time applications

Future flight control systems

Robustness of automotive embedded systems
Analysis (Fault removal and Fault forecasting) Dependability evaluation in a mobile context

Testing in mobile settings 		Risk analysis for autonomously-adapting systems

Testing of autonomous
system software 		Characterization of attacks

Evaluation
of intrusion detection systems

Security measures

Modeling interdependencies
of critical infrastructures 		Testing and formal verification of behavioral models

Dependability benchmarking

Modeling the dependability of critical systems

The computing systems of interest to us are the future large, networked, evolving systems constituting complex information infrastructures interconnecting servers, mobile computers, embedded devices, etc. The major issue at stake in such ubiquitous systems is how to maintain their dependability. The changes to which ubiquitous systems are subjected can be functional, technological, or environmental, and may include or induce new threats.

In this context, our research is best situated in the context of resilience, i.e., the persistence of dependability when facing changes.

From the resilience point of view, ubiquitous systems are facing four challenges: mobility, evolvability and autonomy, openness, reactivity. We are addressing these challenges from two complementary, and closely related, viewpoints:

  • Architecture: design approaches, policies, algorithms, and mechanisms, for fault prevention and fault tolerance.

  • Analysis: verification for fault removal and evaluation for fault forecasting.

An overview of our research topics, structured according to the four challenges, and to the architecture and analysis viewpoints is given in the research topics table.

A strong characteristic of our research relates to the scope of the faults taken into account: hardware physical faults, software faults and malicious interaction faults, i.e., intrusions. Moreover, for many years the group has conducted both conceptual and experimental work. As a consequence, the group benefits from a prominent position within the dependable computing community.