Synthesis of correct and distributed adaptors for component-based systemsProceedings of the 20th IEEE/ACM international Conference on Automated software engineering - ASE '05

Building a distributed system from third-party components introduces a set of problems, mainly related to compatibility and communication. Our approach to solve these problems is to build an adaptor which forces the system to exhibit only a set of safe or desired behaviors. By exploiting an abstract and partial specification of the global behavior that must be enforced, we automatically build a centralized adaptor. It mediates the interaction among components by both per- forming the specified behavior and, simultaneously, avoiding possible deadlocks. However in a distributed environment it is not always possible or convenient to insert a central- ized adaptor. In contrast, building a distributed adaptor might increase the applicability of the approach in a real- scale context. In this paper we show how it is possible to au- tomatically generate a distributed adaptor by exploiting an approach to the definition of distributed IDS (Intrusion De- tection Systems) filters developed by us to increase security measures in component based systems. Firstly, by taking into account a high level specification of the global behav- ior that must be enforced, we synthesize a behavioral model of a centralized adaptor that allows the composed system to only exhibit the specified behavior and, simultaneously, avoid possible unspecified deadlocks. This model represents a lower level specification of the global behavior that is en- forced by the adaptor. Secondly, by taking into account the synthesized adaptor model, we generate a set of component filters that validate the centralized adaptor behavior by sim- ply looking at local information. In this way we address the problem of mechanically generating correct and distributed adaptors for real-scale component-based systems.