In introducing students to cybersecurity, it is essential to go beyond the theoretical exploration of software vulnerabilities. This paper highlights the importance of hands-on practices in cybersecurity education and introduces SecureED as a tool to facilitate practical learning of software vulnerabilities. SecureED was utilized in a secure software development course to facilitate the practical exploration of threat modeling, security requirements, vulnerability exploitation, and vulnerability mitigation. By incorporating SecureED into the curriculum, students were able to actively engage with real-world security challenges and gain a deeper understanding of the subject matter. Course performance and student feedback supported the effectiveness of SecureED for software security education. However, improvements are needed to enhance accessibility and cross-platform compatibility.

A secure design pattern is a well-proven reusable solution to a recurring security problem that arise in specific contexts.Using secure design patterns properly can help tackle software vulnerabilities during software development.However, the lack of selection guidance of secure patterns makes it more difficult for developers to use secure design patterns than conventional design patterns.To address this issue, this paper presents a methodology of selecting the appropriate secure design patterns for software vulnerabilities formalized in anti-patterns.This methodology bridges the gap between the vulnerabilities and secure design patterns to produce a useful tool for secure software development.

This work uses a concrete example to show how security-related content can be added to various courses in a Computer Science curriculum. The course contents are mapped to the most prevalent software security flaws that are identified in the National Vulnerability Database of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. This work demonstrates that security-related content can be added to the curriculum in a comprehensive manner. These course content should not require significant re-tooling of existing faculty to gain specialized knowledge in software security.

Quite a few educational programming languages have been developed to make programming easier to learn. These languages have seen very little adoption in academia. This raises questions about their suitability for their intended purpose as introductory programming languages. A lot of factors are taken into consideration in choosing an introductory programming language. This work presents the results of a survey of computer science degree programs across the United States. The survey shows not only which introductory programming languages are popular but the reasons behind their popularity. It shows the features that are considered important for an introductory programming language and how well the popular introductory languages support those features. This work shows that some popular educational programming languages do not support some of those features that are considered important.

Abstract Motivation: Tag density plots are very important to intuitively reveal biological phenomena from capture-based sequencing data by visualizing the normalized read depth in a region. Results: We have developed iTagPlot to compute tag density across functional features in parallel using multicores and a grid engine and to interactively explore it in a graphical user interface. It allows us to stratify features by defining groups based on biological function and measurement, summary statistics and unsupervised clustering. Availability and implementation: http://sourceforge.net/projects/itagplot/. Contact: [email protected] and [email protected] Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

This paper presents an approach to the runtime management of decentralized service compositions. The goal of the approach is to transparently observe the behavior of peer-to-peer service interaction in order to permit the introduction of adaptive behavior. The design includes a monitoring component that utilizes a choreography model to formulate a global view of the application, and introduce adaptive behavior in a unique way. The design incorporates a mechanism for transforming the choreography to introduce redundancy, and dynamic selection in the interaction.

Web services paradigm is allowing applications to interact with one another over the Internet. BPEL facilitates this interaction by providing a platform through which Web services can be integrated. However, the autonomous and distributed nature of the integrated services presents unique challenges to the reliability of composed services. The focus of our ongoing research is to transparently introduce autonomic behavior to BPEL processes in order to make them more resilient to the failure of partner services. In this work, we present an approach where BPEL processes are adapted by redirecting their interactions with partner services to a dynamic proxy. We describe the generative adaptation process and the architecture of the adaptive BPEL processes and their corresponding proxies. Finally, we use case studies to demonstrate how generated dynamic proxies are used to support self-healing and self-optimization in instrumented BPEL processes

We present a conceptual mediation framework that features three layers of mediators: presence, integration, and homogenization layers that work together in a peer-to-peer (p2p) manner to facilitate the delivery of multimedia data. On arrival of each request for data from a client, a global-mediator is elected from a group of integration layer mediators to service that request. Using distributed hash table (DHT), the global-mediator dispatches the request to other integrator mediators to track down the data sources. Upon receipt of the results, from the source(s), the global-mediator presents the data to the client via a presence-mediator. The presence-mediator may need to reformat the data to suit the execution context of the client. This mediation process is context-aware, adaptive and dynamically structured. Quality of service (QoS) factors are taken into consideration in the retrieval and presentation of data.