Lero@DCU is participating in the EU funded research project MASTER. This 3 year project is researching techniques and tools for managing assurance, security and trust in service based systems.

The business of the future will be characterized by highly dynamic service-oriented architectures where outsourcing and distributed management constitute the norm rather than the exception with an increasing complexity in security and trust requirements from regulations and business standards. Best-effort security will no longer be accepted and business entities will have to provide certified assurance services to customers and expect assured services from contractors in order to manage the associated business and technology risk. MASTER aims at providing methodologies and infrastructures that facilitate the monitoring, enforcement, and audit of quantifiable indicators on the security of a business process, and that provide manageable assurance of the security levels, trust levels and regulatory compliance of highly dynamic service-oriented architecture in centralized, distributed (multidomain), and outsourcing contexts. To this extents MASTER will identify new key indicators, protection and regulatory models and security model transformations coupled with the methodological and verification tools for the analysis and assessment of business processes. It will further define an overall infrastructure for the monitoring, enforcement, reaction, diagnosis and assessment of these indicators centralized, distributed (multidomain), and outsourcing contexts.

Lero@DCU will contribute to the design-time support tools and methodologies for modeling, analysis and verification/validation of key indicators. The supported design time process will capture high level indicators expressing the threats and risk and will analyse and refine them to obtain a level of description appropriate for specifying the behaviour of the run-time system. It will simulate or formally verify that the resulting system does indeed counter the identified threats and risks.

Lero, the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre, advances the state-of-the-art in software engineering for specific domains. Lero is a partnership of academic researchers and industry and is supported by Science Foundation Ireland.

Lero@DCU is offering a post-doctoral post and 2 funded studentships in the area of design tools for security and trust based in the School of Computing, DCU.

If you have an honour degree in Computing please contact email Dr. David Sinclair at David.Sinclair(at)computing.dcu.ie