Seminars
In February 2019, the Software Institute started its SI Seminar Series. Every Thursday afternoon, a researcher of the Institute will publicly give a short talk on a software engineering argument of her choice. Examples include, but are not limited to, novel interesting papers, seminal papers, personal research overview, discussion of preliminary research ideas, tutorials, and small experiments.
On our YouTube playlist you can watch some of the past seminars. Below you can find more details on the next seminar, the upcoming seminars, and an archive of the past speakers.
Everyone is welcome to attend the seminars organized by the Software Institute.
Next Speaker: Srdjan Krstic
Correctness and regulatory compliance of today’s software are crucial for our safety and security. Runtime enforcement addresses this challenge by constructing systems, called enforcers, that observe and actively control the behavior of other systems by modifying their actions to ensure policy compliance. The enforcer’s capabilities, i.e., what they can control on the target system, determine which policies are enforceable.
Specifically, policies require enforcer decisions based on the past or present system behavior (so-called provisions), or additionally on future behavior (so-called obligations). To enforce obligations, enforcers cannot merely react to system actions, but rather proactively act. If the policy imposes time constraints on the target system, the enforcement is considered real-time.
In this talk, I will present a proactive real-time enforcement algorithm for an expressive policy language, called metric first-order temporal logic. Given a policy, the algorithm is sound (i.e., modified behavior always complies with the policy) and transparent (i.e., if the behavior is already policy-compliant, then it is not modified). We implement this algorithm in a tool called WhyEnf and carry out a case study on enforcing GDPR-related policies. Our tool can enforce all policies from the study in real-time with modest overhead. Our work thus provides the first tool-supported approach that can proactively enforce expressive first-order policies in real time.
Srđan Krstić is a senior researcher at ETH Zurich focusing on formal methods for security and privacy. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Politecnico di Milano, where he worked on runtime verification for software engineering.
He has published numerous papers on topics such as runtime verification, model-driven security, user-controlled privacy, and GDPR enforcement. Srđan is currently focused on runtime enforcement techniques to ensure compliance with privacy policies. He has collaborated with various experts in the field and contributed to advancing the understanding and implementation of privacy requirements in IT systems. His most cited paper introduces a taxonomy of runtime verification, which is a popular starting point for researchers to introduce themselves to the field and get a broad overview.