arXiv subjects

M. Ali Babar

Publications and source records attributed to M. Ali Babar.

81 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

An Automated Implementation of Hybrid Cloud for Performance Evaluation of Distributed Databases

A Hybrid cloud is an integration of resources between private and public clouds. It enables users to horizontally scale their on-premises infrastructure up to public clouds in order to improve performance and cut up-front investment cost. This model of applications deployment is called cloud bursting that allows data-intensive applications especially distributed database systems to have the benefit of both private and public clouds. In this work, we present an automated implementation of a hybrid cloud using (i) a robust and zero-cost Linux-based VPN to make a secure connection between private and public clouds, and (ii) Terraform as a software tool to deploy infrastructure resources based on the requirements of hybrid cloud. We also explore performance evaluation of cloud bursting for six modern and distributed database systems on the hybrid cloud spanning over local OpenStack and Microsoft Azure. Our results reveal that MongoDB and MySQL Cluster work efficient in terms of throughput and operations latency if they burst into a public cloud to supply their resources. In contrast, the performance of Cassandra, Riak, Redis, and Couchdb reduces if they significantly leverage their required resources via cloud bursting.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2020

On the Role of Software Architecture in DevOps Transformation: An Industrial Case Study

Development and Operations (DevOps), a particular type of Continuous Software Engineering, has become a popular Software System Engineering paradigm. Software architecture is critical in succeeding with DevOps. However, there is little evidence-based knowledge of how software systems are architected in the industry to enable and support DevOps. Since architectural decisions, along with their rationales and implications, are very important in the architecting process, we performed an industrial case study that has empirically identified and synthesized the key architectural decisions considered essential to DevOps transformation by two software development teams. Our study also reveals that apart from the chosen architecture style, DevOps works best with modular architectures. In addition, we found that the performance of the studied teams can improve in DevOps if operations specialists are added to the teams to perform the operations tasks that require advanced expertise. Finally, investment in testing is inevitable for the teams if they want to release software changes faster.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2020

PUMiner: Mining Security Posts from Developer Question and Answer Websites with PU Learning

Security is an increasing concern in software development. Developer Question and Answer (Q&A) websites provide a large amount of security discussion. Existing studies have used human-defined rules to mine security discussions, but these works still miss many posts, which may lead to an incomplete analysis of the security practices reported on Q&A websites. Traditional supervised Machine Learning methods can automate the mining process; however, the required negative (non-security) class is too expensive to obtain. We propose a novel learning framework, PUMiner, to automatically mine security posts from Q&A websites. PUMiner builds a context-aware embedding model to extract features of the posts, and then develops a two-stage PU model to identify security content using the labelled Positive and Unlabelled posts. We evaluate PUMiner on more than 17.2 million posts on Stack Overflow and 52,611 posts on Security StackExchange. We show that PUMiner is effective with the validation performance of at least 0.85 across all model configurations. Moreover, Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) of PUMiner is 0.906, 0.534 and 0.084 points higher than one-class SVM, positive-similarity filtering, and one-stage PU models on unseen testing posts, respectively. PUMiner also performs well with an MCC of 0.745 for scenarios where string matching totally fails. Even when the ratio of the labelled positive posts to the unlabelled ones is only 1:100, PUMiner still achieves a strong MCC of 0.65, which is 160% better than fully-supervised learning. Using PUMiner, we provide the largest and up-to-date security content on Q&A websites for practitioners and researchers.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2020

A Multi-Vocal Review of Security Orchestration

Organizations use diverse types of security solutions to prevent cyberattacks. Multiple vendors provide security solutions developed using heterogeneous technologies and paradigms. Hence, it is a challenging rather impossible to easily make security solutions to work an integrated fashion. Security orchestration aims at smoothly integrating multivendor security tools that can effectively and efficiently interoperate to support security staff of a Security Operation Centre (SOC). Given the increasing role and importance of security orchestration, there has been an increasing amount of literature on different aspects of security orchestration solutions. However, there has been no effort to systematically review and analyze the reported solutions. We report a Multivocal Literature Review that has systematically selected and reviewed both academic and grey (blogs, web pages, white papers) literature on different aspects of security orchestration published from January 2007 until July 2017. The review has enabled us to provide a working definition of security orchestration and classify the main functionalities of security orchestration into three main areas: unification, orchestration, and automation. We have also identified the core components of a security orchestration platform and categorized the drivers of security orchestration based on technical and socio-technical aspects. We also provide a taxonomy of security orchestration based on the execution environment, automation strategy, deployment type, mode of task and resource type. This review has helped us to reveal several areas of further research and development in security orchestration.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2020

Deep Learning for Source Code Modeling and Generation: Models, Applications and Challenges

Deep Learning (DL) techniques for Natural Language Processing have been evolving remarkably fast. Recently, the DL advances in language modeling, machine translation and paragraph understanding are so prominent that the potential of DL in Software Engineering cannot be overlooked, especially in the field of program learning. To facilitate further research and applications of DL in this field, we provide a comprehensive review to categorize and investigate existing DL methods for source code modeling and generation. To address the limitations of the traditional source code models, we formulate common program learning tasks under an encoder-decoder framework. After that, we introduce recent DL mechanisms suitable to solve such problems. Then, we present the state-of-the-art practices and discuss their challenges with some recommendations for practitioners and researchers as well.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2019

Game theoretical modelling of network/cybersecurity

Game theory is an established branch of mathematics that offers a rich set of mathematical tools for multi-person strategic decision making that can be used to model the interactions of decision makers in security problems who compete for limited and shared resources. This article presents a review of the literature in the area of game theoretical modelling of network/cybersecurity.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2018

Internet of Things Search Engine: Concepts, Classification, and Open Issues

This article focuses on the complicated yet still relatively immature area of the Internet of Things Search Engines (IoTSE). It introduces related concepts of IoTSE and a model called meta-path to describe and classify IoTSE systems based on their functionality. Based on these concepts, we have organized the research and development efforts on IoTSE into eight groups and presented the representative works in each group. The concepts and ideas presented in this article are generated from an extensive structured study on over 200 works spanning over one decade of IoTSE research and development.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2018

Architectural Tactics for Big Data Cybersecurity Analytic Systems: A Review

Context: Big Data Cybersecurity Analytics is aimed at protecting networks, computers, and data from unauthorized access by analysing security event data using big data tools and technologies. Whilst a plethora of Big Data Cybersecurity Analytic Systems have been reported in the literature, there is a lack of a systematic and comprehensive review of the literature from an architectural perspective. Objective: This paper reports a systematic review aimed at identifying the most frequently reported quality attributes and architectural tactics for Big Data Cybersecurity Analytic Systems. Method: We used Systematic Literature Review (SLR) method for reviewing 74 primary studies selected using well-defined criteria. Results: Our findings are twofold: (i) identification of 12 most frequently reported quality attributes and the justification for their significance for Big Data Cybersecurity Analytic Systems; and (ii) identification and codification of 17 architectural tactics for addressing the quality attributes that are commonly associated with Big Data Cybersecurity Analytic systems. The identified tactics include six performance tactics, four accuracy tactics, two scalability tactics, three reliability tactics, and one security and usability tactic each. Conclusion: Our findings have revealed that (a) despite the significance of interoperability, modifiability, adaptability, generality, stealthiness, and privacy assurance, these quality attributes lack explicit architectural support in the literature (b) empirical investigation is required to evaluate the impact of codified architectural tactics (c) a good deal of research effort should be invested to explore the trade-offs and dependencies among the identified tactics and (d) there is a general lack of effective collaboration between academia and industry for supporting the field of Big Data Cybersecurity Analytic Systems.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2017

Understanding the Heterogeneity of Contributors in Bug Bounty Programs

Background: While bug bounty programs are not new in software development, an increasing number of companies, as well as open source projects, rely on external parties to perform the security assessment of their software for reward. However, there is relatively little empirical knowledge about the characteristics of bug bounty program contributors. Aim: This paper aims to understand those contributors by highlighting the heterogeneity among them. Method: We analyzed the histories of 82 bug bounty programs and 2,504 distinct bug bounty contributors, and conducted a quantitative and qualitative survey. Results: We found that there are project-specific and non-specific contributors who have different motivations for contributing to the products and organizations. Conclusions: Our findings provide insights to make bug bounty programs better and for further studies of new software development roles.

cs.SE↗