In recent years, malware has grown extremely rapidly in complexity and rates of system infection. Current generation anti-virus and anti-malware software provides system protection through the use of locally installed monitoring agents, which are dependent upon vendor generated signature and heuristic based rules. However, because these monitoring agents are installed within the systems they are trying to protect, they themselves are potential targets of attack by malware. Pathogen overcomes this issue by using a real-time system monitoring and analysis framework that utilises Virtual Machine introspection (VMI) to allow the monitoring of a system without the need for any locally installed agents. One of the main research problems in VMI is how to parse and interpret the memory of an executing system from outside of that system. Pathogen's contribution is a lightweight introspection framework that bridges the semantic gap.

This paper examines historical releases of Sendmail, Postfix, Apache httpd and OpenSSL by using static source code analysis and the entry-rate in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures dictionary (CVE) for a release, which we take as a measure of the rate of discovery of exploitable bugs. We show that the change in number and density of issues reported by the source code analyzer is indicative of the change in rate of discovery of exploitable bugs for new releases --- formally we demonstrate a statistically significant correlation of moderate strength. The strength of the correlation is an artifact of other factors such as the degree of scrutiny: the number of security analysts investigating the software. This also demonstrates that static source code analysis can be used to make some assessment of risk even when constraints do not permit human review of the issues identified by the analysis.

SUMMARY Cloud computing infrastructure services enable the flexible creation of virtual infrastructures on‐demand. However, the creation of infrastructures is only a part of the process for provisioning services. Other steps such as installation, deployment, configuration, monitoring and management of software components are needed to fully provide services to end‐users in the cloud. This paper describes a peer‐to‐peer architecture to automatically deploy services on cloud infrastructures. The architecture uses a component repository to manage the deployment of these software components, enabling elasticity by using the underlying cloud infrastructure provider. The life cycle of these components is described in this paper, as well as the language for defining them. We also describe the open‐source proof‐of‐concept implementation. Some technical information about this implementation together with some statistical results are also provided. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Using Java security as an example, this paper tries to draw attention to the various issues of security in large scale distributed systems, some of which are often ignored when the security mechanisms are designed. Even though a lot of work has been done on Java security, we argue in this paper that due to weaknesses inherent in the Java approach to building sandboxes, Java security is not suitable when applied to large-scale distributed systems. In addition, the paper also explains the impact of these issues on the security mechanisms and introduces some of our efforts to find the security mechanisms that address the issues of building large scale secure systems.