XACML and RAdAC

This week I have been familiarizing myself with XACML. It seems to be a very flexible policy language; albeit a bit complex. I've found the programmer's guide for Sun's XACML implementation to be a good introduction, but I'll be skimming the OASIS documentation to get a more thorough grasp of the standard. I am to use XACML to implement an RAdAC policy. To do so, two metrics will have to be calculated: a 'Security Risk' and an 'Operational Need'. I'm sure they will be calculated by some sort of function.

Paper Completion and OOPSLA

I've finished writing my paper. Last weekend was spent converting it to the ACM Proceedings format and reducing it to two pages. After reading Dr. Xie's PowerPoint, “Common Technical Writing Issues,” I found many grammatical mistakes in my own writing. It was very helpful in getting the review process started. After I addressed Dr. Xie's comments and fixed the errors discussed in his presentation, I submitted it to the OOPSLA Student Research Competition; I also submitted a poster describing the approach discussed in the paper.

Working Implementation

I've written a series of batch files and shell scripts to automate the testing process, so I now have a working implementation. The output is a series of text files (each corresponding to a partially masked rule) consisting of packets and their associated decisions. The number of packets generated depends on the number of rules involved in the masking, but on the policies I've been testing it with, they seem to be relatively low in number. I'm confident that the algorithm I am using to generate the packets is thorough. Most of this past week, I've been catching up on writing and doing classwork.

First Post

This is my first post in the REU blog. I received JeeHyun's tool from his SRDS08 paper this week. So far, I've been able to modify his tool to generate packets that target rule intersections. I've got to work a bit on making the output of the FireMAN tool useful to JeeHyun's tool though. This could be a bit awkward, since they run on different platforms (JeeHyun's tool uses a constraint solver by MS, simple Linux replacement available?), and use different firewall formats. In any event, paper writing is definitely more difficult than I originally anticipated. Now that I have everything I need (and know how it all fits together), hopefully the writing will become easier.

Semester Conclusion and Follow Up

At the conclusion of the spring semester, I came home greatly anticipating my grades. I ended up doing fairly well, receiving score of either an A or A- in all of my courses. Although my GPA went up quite a bit, it wasn't as much as I had hoped. Overall, I think I did well for myself.

I met with Dr. Xie to further discuss my work and the critical importance of citations. I learned it is very simple to plagiarize, even if it is unintentional. Regardless of intentional or unintentional plagiarism, it is still very wrong and carries dire consequences in research. Another issue that was addressed was communication. I will strive to improve and keep Dr. Xie and the graduate students informed of my activities.

We also discussed the research I shall be conducting this summer, deciding on my looking and familiarizing myself with the Pex tool. Thus I have been looking over C# and Pex tutorials since I have not done a lot of programming involving the two. I am constantly talking with Chris as far as the tool and his research is involved. The tool is very interesting and I hope I can apply it well in my summer research.

Outside of all this, I am updating my personal documents (i.e. my resume and website). Thinking back on all I have done at state, I seem to have done a lot outside of research as well. I shall compile all of my activities in an updated resume and ask for Dr. Xie's and the graduate students' opinions. The same applies for the website, although my summer research shall also be documented on it. I shall be making posts to this blog linking to my website about my progress or interesting findings I come across during my summer research.

STARS Banquet

At the STARS banquet, I presented a short overview of the research on Combinatorial Testing. I was glad when Dr. Xie said I did a good job and also commented on my flaws. The main flaw was I did not focus on the selling point of our approach, which is the fault-detection capability. The presentation would have been a lot better if I had made that point clearer. Overall, the banquet went very well and I met Ken Tate, one of the Director of Development & External Relations in the Department of Computer Science. This banquet served as a great networking opportunity, but unfortunately, I left my business cards in my room.

Readings & Poster

I have been reading further in the book on pragmatic thinking and am trying to apply its teachings towards aspects of research, (i.e. the paper and poster). I am still in the process of revising the paper, focusing on its lack of logical flow in order to improve it. Although I have the content in the poster paper, I am still plaguing myself with questions as far as converting the information into an actual poster. JeeHyun has been a great help and, with his help, I'm sure we shall create a great poster to present at the Tapia 2009 conference.