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Journal of System Architecture (JSA)
Special Issue on "Security and Dependability Assurance of
Software Architectures"
http://ees.elsevier.com/jsa/
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Introduction
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The ongoing shift from software development from scratch to component
and service-based system integration has raised a number of new
challenges for software engineering in industrial-strength domains
such as embedded systems, telecommunications, and process control. To
name but a few, these challenges include the treatment of evolving
requirements and assurance of security and dependability properties
(S&D) under unpredictable runtime conditions.

The increasing number of critical processes supported by software
systems and the increasing dependence of valuable assets (including human
well-being, or even human lives) on the security and dependability of
computer support for these processes introduce the need of new mechanisms
that can improve the level of trust we have in such systems. One central
concept in this direction is certification.

Furthermore, the inevitable trend towards distributed systems built by
integrating and embedding subsystems, components or services that are
frequently under the control of different entities makes the certification
of such systems a challenging open issue that current practices for
certification fail to address appropriately. In fact, in future
scenarios, systems will be dynamically assembled, thus achieving higher
levels of flexibility.

In this scenario, traditional techniques for achieving security and
dependability assurance seem inadequate, since current S&D assurance
and certification are strictly intertwined with the development process,
and therefore are only valid for systems and environments planned at
design time and not changing at runtime.

These two characteristics of new distributed systems and computing
environments introduce the need of basing security and dependability
assurance and certification on rigorous, in-depth system analysis.
In this context, methodologies, techniques, and tools for assessing and
certifying the security level of software become an important aspect
towards the design and development of software components to be
integrated in complex system architectures.

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Topics
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The JSA special issue will focus in particular on context, methodologies,
techniques, and tools for V&V of software architectures, with particular
focus on supporting assurance and compliance, as well as security and
dependability certification, for evolving and long-lived systems. Authors
are invited to submit papers on a variety of topics, including but not
limited to:
- foundations and new perspectives of V&V mechanisms and security
certifications;
- solutions, tools, frameworks for S&D assurance and certification;
- new and/or existing certification processes and tools suitable for
challenging contexts (e.g., telecommunications, mobile, real time,
process control, and embedded systems), and/or experience with them;
- new and/or existing modelling techniques which are particularly suited
to evolving systems, and/or experience with them;
- tools and case studies that integrate techniques from different areas,
such as
. V&V mechanisms, including static verification, dynamic verification,
testing
. product and process certification,
. empirical software engineering,
. modeling of evolving and distributed systems.

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Submission
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Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor be currently
under consideration for publication elsewhere. Submission must be in the
form of a PDF file and must be in English. All papers will be thoroughly
refereed. A guide for authors, sample copies and other relevant information
for submitting papers are available on the Papers Submission section of the
Journal of Systems Architecture Web site (http://ees.elsevier.com/jsa/)
under Author Guidelines. Submitted papers must be less than 20 pages long.
Papers must be submitted using the submission web site
http://ees.elsevier.com/jsa Submit Paper. and selecting the option "Special
Issue: S&D Assurance of SW Architecture" as Article Type.

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Important dates
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Submission: October 15th, 2009 (extended)
Notification: December 1st, 2009
Camera Ready: January 10th, 2010

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Guest Editors
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- Ernesto Damiani, ernesto.damiani@unimi.it, Universita' degli Studi di
Milano, DTI, Crema, Italy
- Sigrid Guergens, sigrid.guergens@sit.fraunhofer.de, Fraunhofer Institute
for Secure Information Technology, Darmstadt, Germany
- Antonio Mana, amg@lcc.uma.es, GISUM, Universidad de Malaga, Malaga,
Spain
- George Spanoudakis, gespan@soi.city.ac.uk, Department of Computing
School of Informatics, City University, London
- Claudio A. Ardagna, claudio.ardagna@unimi.it, Universita' degli Studi di
Milano, DTI, Crema, Italy

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For further inquiries, please send an email to claudio.ardagna@unimi.it
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