WRSM 2003


Program Chair

Priya Narasimhan
Carnegie Mellon University

Publicity Chair

 

Pascal Felber
Institut Eurecom, France

Program Committee

Dave Bakken
Washington State University, Pullman, USA
Isabelle Rouvellou
IBM Research, New York, USA
Jean-Charles Fabre
LAAS, France
Nuno Ferreira Neves
Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal
Paul Ezhilchelvan
University of Newcastle, UK
Roberto Baldoni
University of Rome "La Sapienza", Italy
Roy Friedman
Technion, Israel

 

CALL FOR PAPERS

Workshop on Reliable and Secure Middleware

November 3-7, 2003
Sicily, Italy

Part of the
Distributed Objects and Applications (DOA) 2003

Proceedings published by Springer LNCS


Middleware technologies, such as CORBA, Java, EJB and Jini, are becoming increasingly popular for building both embedded and enterprise applications. While middleware infrastructures exhibit attractive features (such as portability, interoperability, etc.) from an application development perspective, they are still lacking in reliability and security. Thus, while middleware is gaining adoption is most application domains, there is still some reluctance in deploying middleware in mission-critical systems with high dependability requirements. This has led, over the past few years, to several academic and industrial research efforts aimed at correcting this deficiency. For the most part, these research efforts have been independent of each other, and have often focused on specific pieces of the dependability puzzle. However, the puzzle is far from complete; for example, issues such as non-determinism in middleware are yet to be dealt with. Our aim, in this Workshop, is to bring researchers and practitioners (and therefore, some of the pieces of the puzzle) together, to further our insights on reliable and secure middleware, and to investigate collectively the challenges that remain.

Future research on middleware systems will focus on not just reliability and/or security, but many other "-ilities", such as adaptability, scalability, availability, mobility, security, real-time, etc. Marrying fault tolerance and/or security with any other "-ility" is a non-trivial task, and requires analyzing various trade-offs; for instance, how can we reconcile the very different multi-threading, scheduling and ordering requirements of fault tolerance and real-time, respectively, within a single middleware infrastructure? Research on dependable middleware will have to address such challenges in composing reliability and security with several other "-ilities" in order to build useful real-world systems.

The purpose of this one-day workshop is to provide a forum for researchers and practitioners from both industry and academia to discuss the latest practices in building reliable and secure distributed object infrastructures, to explore ways of making today's middleware technologies more robust, and to investigate the enhancement of existing reliable, secure middleware with other "-ilities".

TOPICS OF INTEREST

The Workshop solicits contributions on topics related to, but not limited to, the following:

  • Experiences with reliability and security in middleware infrastructures (e.g., CORBA, DCOM, Java RMI, EJB, .NET, Web Services)
  • Coping with non-determinism in reliable and secure middleware systems
  • Lessons learned in building/using dependable middleware: what works, what doesn't
  • Integrating dependable embedded and enterprise middleware systems
  • Trade-offs in adding other features (adaptability, scalability, availability, mobility, security, real-time, live upgrades, etc.) to reliable and secure middleware infrastructures
  • Integration of reliability and security into formal distributed object models
  • Algorithms and mechanisms for intrusion tolerance and dependability
  • Shaping/enhancing standards for reliable and secure middleware
  • Metrics, benchmarks and performance studies in evaluating reliability and security for middleware applications
  • Limitations of existing fault tolerance and security technologies in the context of middleware applications
  • Combining different dependability strategies, e.g., replication with transactions

PAPER SUBMISSIONS

Papers must be written in English and printed using at least 11-point type and 1-1/2 line spacing, and can be one of two possible types:

  • Papers presenting research results, of 5-15 pages in length, including figures
  • Papers presenting position statements, of 3-5 pages in length, from potential participants, who prefer to serve as panelists or commentators.

Accepted workshop contributions (written material) will be published by Springer-Verlag as a part of the Proceedings of the 2003 International Conference on Distributed Objects and Applications (DOA).

Authors are requested to submit an electronic version (PostScript or PDF) of their paper before July 25, 2003 to the following address: priya@cs.cmu.edu

Authors will be notified of the acceptance of their papers by August 5, 2003.

IMPORTANT DATES

  • July 25, 2003 : Deadline for submission of paper
  • August 5, 2003 : Notification of acceptance
  • August 20, 2003 : Deadline for manuscripts of accepted papers

 


Questions & comments on this website to priya@cs.cmu.edu