Browsing by Author "Pereira, Paulo Macedo"
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- Analysis of Network Attacks and Security Events using Modern Data Visualization TechniquesPublication . Pereira, Paulo Macedo; Fernandes, João Paulo de Sousa Ferreira; Sousa, Simão Patrício Melo deModern society is nowadays evolving at a pace that has never been witnessed before. Regarding this evolution, it can be also observed that the technological evolution has been one of its main pillars. In this context, software systems have a crucial role and it is increasingly important to ensure that these systems reach the market on time and with quality guarantees. In order to ensure these goals, several new methodologies and software development environments have been proposed, together with modern tools that enable software systems evolution and continuous integration, as well as increasingly advanced strategies for software veri cation and validation. Concerning software veri cation and validation, which in different ways aim to ensure software quality, design and execution of software tests play a key role. However, the constant evolution of software system implies that test artifacts are able to evolve at the same pace. In fact, these artifacts are indeed evolving fast as well, and this implies that it is needed to deal with test suites of constantly increasing size. A major challenge of modern software engineering has to do precisely with the need to develop mechanisms that allow the software tests execution stage to imply less costs in terms of time and money, but also of human effort. These mechanisms must necessarily achieve a reduction in terms of costs without jeopardizing the quality of the software tests execution stage. In this dissertation an automatic test case selection technique is proposed, which aims, in each iteration of software test executions, to only select for execution test cases whose results might be in uenced by the changes that have been made to the code of the software under test. The proposed technique is based on static and dynamic dependency analysis between software tests and the software code (and the code itself), as well as on the identi cation of the differences between different software code versions. The development, implementation and validation of the technique presented in this dissertation were conducted in the industrial context of an international software house. Real development scenarios were used to conduct experiments and validations, and the nal results demonstrated that the proposed technique is effective in terms of its software fault detection capabilities and also showed signi cant bene ts in what concerns the time spent running software tests.
- Analysis of Network Attacks and Security Events using Modern Data Visualization TechniquesPublication . Pereira, Paulo Macedo; Inácio, Pedro Ricardo MoraisData visualization techniques comprise crucial resources in many research and professional areas. Effective representations often contribute to the understanding of the overall picture behind a large volume of data, sometimes leading to novel discoveries or to an ef cient synthesis. Due to the large amount of data that computers handle nowadays, many modern data visualizations techniques were designed to deal with such large data sets, exhibiting unique characteristics. In the information era, computers (and their operators) and networks are also amongst the biggest sources of raw data, though they are also used in its processing and storage. Many network monitoring systems and security appliances make usage of traditional data visualization techniques in reporting functionalities or to provide practitioners with status information. The scope of this work falls within the intersection of the elds of network security and data visualization techniques. Its objectives are to study modern approaches to represent data, which may be currently being used in other areas, and apply one of those approaches in the visualization of network traf c and attacks. Assessing the usefulness of the visualizations was also an objective, along with the constitution of a large data set of representations for several traf c classes and classical network attacks. A technique known as Circos, widely used for genomic representations, was the one applied for achieving the objectives of this masters program. Many representations for at least 18 different traf c traces were produced along this work, with many analyzed with detail in this dissertation. These traces, containing traf c generated by contemporary applications and classical network attacks or probing activities, were selected from two datasets. In order to produce the Circos, a minimal set of traf c characteristics was identi ed,and several scripts for automating the processing were implemented. Towards the nal part of this work, an experiment based on the (human) comparison between nine labeled and nine unlabeled Circos was set up to demonstrate that the obtained representations were useful up to the point of being used to identify traf c classes or attacks. During the experiment, it was possible to correctly identify eight, out of the nine, traces (one of the attacks was incorrectly classi ed as HTTP traf c), proving the usefulness of this technique in this eld.