Open PhD Position at Ascola, France

Project-Team Ascola
Ecole des Mines de Nantes
INRIA, LINA
Nantes, France

We are seeking a PhD student to work on the project "Compositional 
Evolutions of Secure Services with Aspects" (CESSA).
Four partners collaborates within the project coordinated by Ascola:
- INRIA project-team Ascola, located at Ecole des Mines, Nantes, France
- a security research team from Eurecom, Sophia-Antipolis, France
- the Security and Trust team from SAP Labs, Sophia-Antipolis, France
- IS2T, an innovative start-up company developing middleware 
technologies, Nantes, France

The scope of the thesis includes the synthesis using aspects of secure 
applications based on services (SOA applications). It should cover not 
only the security certification of the synthesized applications, but 
also the preservation of semantical properties, which is a real challenge.
In the field of language design and implementation, you would contribute 
to the modularization of security functionalities.
In the field of formal methods, you would apply them to guarantee 
security properties of SOAs.
You should have a keen interest in applying rigorous techniques or 
formal methods to real-world systems, with a strong background in one or 
more of the following:
* Aspect-Oriented Programming,
* Distributed Programming,
* Formal Semantics for Programming Languages,
* Program Verification,
* Automated Proof Assistants (like Coq).

Enquiries about the project should be addressed to Dr Mario Südholt 
(http://www.emn.fr/x-info/sudholt/) or Dr Hervé Grall 
(http://www.emn.fr/x-info/hgrall/).
See below for a brief presentation.

Applications should include:
* a Curriculum Vitae,
* a brief statement of the particular contribution you would make to the 
project,
* the names and contact details (e-mail addresses) of two or three 
referees. Please ask your referees to send confidential references 
directly to Mario Südholt via e-mail.
Complete applications should be sent by e-mail to Mario Südholt and 
Hervé Grall.

The position is to be filled as soon as possible. It is funded by a 
grant from the french national research agency (agence nationale de la 
recherche, ANR).

=====================================================================

Service-oriented architectures (SOAs) constitute a major style for 
component-based architectures used to build large-scale distributed 
systems. A service is a software application that can be located over a 
network and whose interfaces and bindings can be defined, described and 
discovered by using certain standardized access means and formats. A SOA 
typically spans a number of different organizations, and may involve 
powerful servers as well as resource-constraint devices (e.g., mobile 
devices). Similar to other compositional structuring mechanisms, SOAs 
are subject to the problem of cross-cutting functionalities, that is, 
functionalities that are scattered and tangled over large par of the 
architecture and the underlying implementation. Security 
functionalities, such as access control and monitoring for intrusion 
detection, are a prime example of such a functionality in that it is not 
possible to modularize security issues in a well-separated module. 
Aspect-Oriented Software Development is an application-structuring 
method that addresses in a systemic way the problem of the lack of 
modularization facilities for cross-cutting functionalities. The 
partners of the CESSA industrial research project will develop solutions 
to secure SOAs by providing an aspect-oriented structuring and 
programming model that allows security functionalities to be 
modularized. By means of security aspects and a new notion of 
aspect-aware service interfaces, CESSA will enable the synthesis of 
SOA-based applications that are correct by construction and will allow 
the formal analysis of security properties of SOAs. Furthermore, the 
partners will demonstrate that security aspects support the secure 
horizontal composition (i.e., orchestration and choreography of 
services) and vertical composition (i.e., service implementation) of 
real-world industrial SOAs in the context of (i) an extension of an 
enterprise  information system from the first industrial partner SAP, 
extension that is motivated by needs for evolution of software in the 
financial sector due to regulatory requirements, and (ii) the 
integration into a commercial SOA of embedded devices using customized 
virtual machines produced by the second industrial partner IS2T.


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