Project

Within the scope of a research & development project for Samsung program analysis group employees have developed an instrumentation tool for automatic Android/Tizen ARM executable and library modification. Target file modification is performed through processing and replacing direct binary code using an approach similar to aspect-oriented programming methods. Developed tool was primarily used for performance analysis, targeting Android and Tizen system executables and libraries designed for drawing GUI.

Software plays a key role in many systems, e.g., safety-, security-, and missioncritical systems. Bugs in such software can lead to catastrophic consequences. As a result development of critical software is regulated by certification standards/guidelines (like DO-178С, ISO/IEC 15408, etc) that require following best practices in development process.

Avalanche − an automatic program traversal and defect detection tool based on Valgrind (dynamic instrumentation framework) − started by program analysis group as a project in 2009. It performs an extensive analysis of a target program by tracing tainted data flow (all external input data received through input streams, file system, network sockets, environment variables and command line arguments, and internal program data derived from external input data) through executed code branching points.

Many hardware-based techniques have been developed for support of increasing data flows: high-speed network channels and memory buses, high frequency CPUs, hard disks with high data density and low access time. However, numerous unsolved problems remain on the software side dealing with processing, analyzing and storing data. This software must use hardware resources efficiently and also satisfy rigid requirements: support batch processing of huge data volumes with high throughput, provide reliable functioning on unreliable hardware, allow for good scaling and efficient random data access. This project is aimed at creating a framework for data acquirement, filtering, analysis and storage in real time on high-speed network channels. This framework will allow automation of a wide range of tasks related to high-speed data flows: classifying traffic, ensuring network security, analyzing social networks, and forecasting using big data.

QEMU is a full-system multi-target open source emulator. It is widely used for software cross-development. Many large companies (e.g., Google, Samsung, Oracle) prototype and emulate their hardware platforms and peripheral devices on QEMU. QEMU 2.9 emulates 20 different hardware platform families, including x86, PowerPC, Sparc, MIPS, ARM.

Software developers often face a problem of incorporating complex computations, data encryption and compression algorithms, and similar common notions into their code. This is typically done by using standard libraries specializing in a group of tasks; these libraries are often distributed in binary code only. On the other hand, software maintenance is gradually becoming more and more important within the development cycle; software maintenance incorporates the task of updating both its code and external libraries. External libraries and auxiliary programs, distributed in binary form, need to conform to quality and security standards.

Casr creates automatic reports for crashes happened during program testing or deployment. The tool works by analyz-ing Linux coredump files. The resulting reports contain the crash’s severity and additional data that is helpful for pin-pointing the error cause.

The idea of the project is to build a solution for processing Big Data collected from numerical simulation of continuum mechanics problems.

Different methods of analysis of random graphs, construction of new mathematical models of scale-free graphs (conforming the so-called power law) is a topical area of research concerning the analysis of networks on the Internet (in particular, social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and many others). However, the properties and parameters of these networks can change. To predict such changes it is necessary to study the general properties of mathematical models of such networks which can be considered as random graphs.

This project was aimed on creation of a firewall based on free software and capable of providing an effective protection for local networks from unauthorized access from the outside.

The project goal is to create system toolchain software that improves programmer's productivity on distributed heterogeneous systems (typically with nodes having a couple of multicore CPUs and accelerator(s) like GPUs). We will be researching on tools for finding program bottlenecks, critical errors (including multithreaded performance), and trying new programming standards. We will also be improving problem specific parallel algorithms in the sparse matrix libraries and OpenFOAM framework for CFD problems.

Organization of effective interaction between IPv4 and IPv6 networks could not be done on the basis of existing mechanisms without the creation of application-level gateways translating corresponding protocol elements in this level. This project was aimed on design and implementation of such tools. Moreover network software debugging and testing is time consuming and error-prone if done manually. This is why as a part of this project tools for automated testing of network software were developed.

Test suite «Mathematics» — is a suite of tests for mathematical functions of POSICX standard programming interface checking both implementation conformance to the standard and accuracy of results on a huge set of specifically selected test data. Test data sources for the suite are intervals of homogeneous behavior of the functions under test, boundary and special values of floating-point numbers, and numbers, for which accurate computation of a function value requires more than average effort. The test reports can present results both in a brief view and with detailed distribution of the errors detected and lists of most serious errors.

Docmarking is a unique system for embedding digital watermarks into text documents. It allows creating a digital or physical document copy that is almost indistinguishable from the original yet exactly identifies the user or the device that was the intended recipient.

The aim of the project is to study various generalizations of the problem of unification and anti-unification of algebraic terms, the estimation of complexity and development of efficient algorithms for solving these problems, the study of formal models of programs in order to select those models in which the problem of detecting the similarity of programs is reduced to the problems of verification of equivalence and minimization programs атв also to the problems of unification and anti-unification of algebraic terms.

New method to provide compatibility for IPv4 and IPv6 protocols fulfilling the draft of the “Stateless IP/ICMP Translator (SIIT)” standard was created and implemented in this project. This method coupled with other means can provide seamless transition to IPv6 protocol. The method was successfully applied to Linux operation system after the studying of its specific features.

This project was concentrated on the specific features of FreeBSD and adaptation of stateless translator developed in the previous project to FreeBSD environment.

Stateless IP/ICMP Translator (SIIT) has a number of limitations. Implemented in this project context method of addresses and protocols translation (NAT-PT) in Linux and FreeBSD allowed usage of normal IPv6 addresses instead of specific ones in IPv6 subnetworks as well as dynamic assigning of IPv4 addresses to IPv6 nodes in the process of session creation when IPv6 and IPv4 networks communicate.

ISP Crusher is a toolset that combines various dynamic analysis approaches. It includes ISP Fuzzer, a fuzzing tool, and Sydr, an automatic test generation tool for complex pro-grams. Two other ISP RAS analyzers, BinSide and Casr, will be included in Crusher within the next two years. Crusher allows organizing a development process that is fully compliant with GOST R 56939-2016 and other regulatory requirements of FSTEC of Russia.

ISP Obfuscator is based on long-term research that ISP RAS started as early as 2002. The obfuscation technology grew up from basic research to industrial deployment. It is covered by dozens of publications and two PhD theses during these years. ISP Obfuscator integrates with compilers to make those transformations transparent for developers. At the moment two compiler infrastructures are supported: LLVM and GCC.

Linux Driver Verification (LDV) program is aimed to meet increased demand for large-scale verification tools applicable to high profile software.

The Modular Avionics System Integrator Workplace framework is intended to automate the design of real-time aviation electronics systems based on Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) architecture.

MicroTESK (Microprocessor TEsting and Specification Kit) is a framework for generating test programs in assembly language for functional verification of microprocessors. It uses formal specifications as a source of knowledge about the configuration of the microprocessor under verification. Generation tasks are described in a special Ruby-based language which allows formulating verification goals in terms of test situations derived from formal specifications. Such an approach simplifies configuring the framework and improves the level of test coverage. MicroTESK has been successfully applied in industrial projects for verification of ARMv8 and MIPS64 microprocessors.

Study the possibility of using homomorphic computing to organize confidential calculations, including the development of a model for cloud computing privacy using homomorphic threshold calculations. Study the algorithmic complexity of solving equations in the semigroup of finite permutations of the first order.

The main aim of the project is to create software tools that allow more efficient use of computing resources in the cloud. The results are applied in the system UniHUB for hosting applications on virtual machines running OpenStack.

This project pursued the following two goals. The first was in providing means for active information exchange performed to enhance research activities in the area of system programming and creation of new system software in collaboration with Russian and foreign scientific institutes including the projects using the Internet. The second was in creation of ISP RAS own web-server.

Nowadays, the task of network traffic analysis is of increasing relevance: the reasons are improvement and deployment of new network technologies (VoIP, P2P, streaming video) and emergence of numerous application level protocols used by new network applications. Offline or online analysis is employed, depending on particular analysis system and the problem being solved.

Research and development of methods for distributed large graph processing.

The importance of network traffic analysis is constantly increasing because of novel network technologies being developed immediately hitting the market, thus increasing data volume (including personal and sensitive information) transmitted over network by innumerable network applications many of which implement closed application level protocols. Available network analysis tools typically don’t offer generic facilities to inspect application protocols, usually only widespread protocols are supported.

The project is aimed on research and development of the methods for storing, searching and processing of the information taking into account of its complex structure and spatio-temporal semantics. In the scope of the project the decomposition method base on dynamic octrees should be developed and investigated, their complexity should be estimated and recommendations for its practical usage should be elaborated.

Reuse of code fragments, often using in software development. At the level of the source code, it can be part of a program that performs a similar role, but copied with slight modifications. On the binary level it may be object files from libraries are included on the linking stage in the several executable files of the program.

To protect the binary code from analysis  are used by many different methods, one of them - obfuscation transformations. Such transformations are usually made with automatic obfuscators, which takes as input the source code or binary file, and output provide an obfuscated executable program.

HDL Retrascope is a toolkit for reverse engineering and transformation of digital hardware designs described in such HDLs (hardware description languages) as Verilog и VHDL. The toolkit allows analyzing HDL descriptions, reconstructing the underlying models (extended finite state machines, EFSMs) and using the derived models for test generation, property checking and other tasks. HDL Retrascope is organized as an extendable framework with the ability to add new types of models as well as tools for their analysis and transformation. The primary application domain of the toolkit is functional verification of hardware at the unit level.

SciNoon is a system for collaborative exploration of scientific papers. SciNoon is an essential tool for a group of researchers to dive quickly into the new area of knowledge and to find answers on their questions, following up with tracking new research on the topic of interest with highly customizable alerts.

The project goal is to create methods for solving program understanding problems that arise during the program lifecycle. The basic information for such methods is program structure, that is, program entities, relations between them, and their metrics. The methods will be used in the task of easing the back/forward porting of code changes between different versions of the given program.

SharpChecker is the platform for static analysis of C# programs, aimed at finding bugs. The tool contains both a code analyzer engine as well as components ready for integration into industrial development processes. SharpChecker can be used not only by programmers to fix errors in the project, but also by managers as another dynamic metric to evaluate the quality of the product.

The project is designed to research the feasibility of applying static program analysis techniques for dynamically-typed languages. First prototype implementation of the analysis tool targeted Python language and performed type inference to automatically identify related errors. Current work on the project includes extending the type inference engine by processing program control flow structure.

A joint project between the program analysis group and Klocwork, a Rogue Wave Company (previously Klocwork Inc.) focuses on the development of a tool set for static source code analysis for extensive (over 1 million SLOC) C, C++ and C# projects.

Summer is a Java-based test development and test execution framework similar to JUnit and TestNG, but supporting model based testing techniques (like NModel for C#).

ISP RAS has developed Svace static analysis tool that satisfies all requirements for a production quality analyzer. Svace supports C/C++, Java, and C# programming languages (C# can be also shipped separately as it is implemented as a standalone tool), and it runs on Linux and Windows. Svace analyzes programs that can be built on Intel x86/x86-64 Linux/Windows, ARM/ARM64 architectures. Popular C/C++ compilers for Linux and Windows are supported as well as a range of compilers for embedded systems.

ISP RAS has developed a number of original methods for social analysis which were combined into a technology called Talisman. Unlike most existing solutions for social analytics, Talisman technology was originally aimed at working with large amounts of data. The most promising open solutions from the stack of Big Data technologies are employed, such as: Apache Spark, GraphX, MLLib, etc.

The project conducted in partnership with JSC "VimpelCom" is aimed at development of software testing practices at the level of enterprise information system as a whole. The project covers a wide variety of topics: from requirement gathering for legacy-systems to coverage analysis in end-to-end system testing.

The basic problem of text analysis is natural language ambiguity: same words can have different meanings depending on the context. Context understanding requires knowledge bases describing real world concepts. Construction of such knowledge bases (or ontologies) is a very resource- and time-consuming task. Texterra technology provides tools for automatic extraction of knowledge bases from partially structured resources, e.g. Wikipedia and Wikidata, and tools for analysis of texts semantics on top of these knowledge bases. Texterra technology is actively applied in research and industrial projects of ISP RAS.

UniTESK is a technology for testing application program interfaces (API) which is primarily designed for unit testing.
UniTESK stands for Unified TEsting Specification based toolKit. UniTESK uniformity is provided by the fact that the common testing methodology and general architecture can be implemented for testing modules written in almost all programming languages. Currently there are UniTESK implementations for such languages as C (CTESK), C++ (C++TESK), Java (JavaTESK and Summer), Python (PyTESK).

The studies of changes in security features of IP level introduced in IPsec v2 showed that formal specification and test scenarios designed in the previous project were almost impossible to use. New version of security features consisted of new protocols for protecting and transmitting data incompatible with the protocols from the previous version of IPsec. This project was aimed at the creation of new formal specifications and test scenarios and providing means for automated verification of security features in the implementations of the new protocols. This project was also done in close collaboration with Programming technologies department.

This project was devoted to research and development of formal methods for modeling telecommunication protocols in terms of security and mobility. Also new methods and tools were developed for automated tests generation used to check compliance with Internet standards. This project was done in collaboration with Programming technologies department.