This publication describes the design of four maintenance tests for the Federal Information Processing Data Encryption Standard (DES).  The tests consist of an iterative procedure that tests the operation of DES devices by using a small program and minimum data.  The tests are designed to be independent of implementation and to be fast enough to test devices during actual operation.  The tests are defined as four specific stopping points in a general testing process and satisfy four testing requirements of increasing degree of completeness depending on the throughness of testing desired.

Although much thought usually goes into the design of encryption algorithms and protocols, less consideration is often given to equally important issues such as the selection of cryptographically strong random numbers, so that an attacker may find it easier to break the random number generator than the security system it is used with. This paper provides a comprehensive guide to designing and implementing a practically strong random data accumulator and generator which requires no specialised hardware or access to privileged system services. The performance of the generator on a variety of systems is analysed, and measures which can make recovery of the accumulator/generator state information more difficult for an attacker are presented. The result is an easy to use random number generator which should be suitable even for demanding cryptographic applications.

Despite the application of rigorous development methodologies, program errors are generally regarded as a fundamental phenomenon in sufficiently complex software systems. Yet, computer software is employed to control larger, more complex, more potentially dangerous systems than ever before. Ensuring that these software systems function correctly is a vital concern. A large class of well-known software testing techniques require information attained by executing the program under test. We are interested in those techniques that monitor and/or modify the internal behavior of the executing program. This work proposes new methods to efficiently and effectively support these techniques while executing programs in their target run-time environment. Consequently, we are concerned with machine executable programs and our approach is compiler-based. This approach, as opposed to more traditional interpreter-based approaches, will afford a significant increase execution speed during software testing, increased confidence in the accuracy of a software test, and a new set of capabilities with which to test software. It is hoped that, as a result, current state-of the-art structural and fault-based testing techniques will become significantly more cost-effective and attractive as a means to test real, production software systems.

This paper describes a new model for constructing distributed systems called the Remote Memory Model. The remote memory model consists of several client machines, one or more dedicated machines called remote memory servers, and a communication channel interconnecting them. In the remote memory model, client machines share the memory resources located on the remote memory server. Client machines that exhaust their local memory move portions of their address space to the remote memory server and retrieve pieces as needed. Because the remote memory server uses a machine-independent protocol to communicate with client machines, the remote memory server can support multiple heterogenous client machines simultaneously. This paper describes the remote memory model and discusses the advantages and issues of system that use this model.It examines the design of a highly efficient, reliable, machine-independent protocol used by the remote memory server to communicate with the client machines. It also outlines the algorithms and data structures employed by the remote memory server to efficiently locate the data stored on the server. Finally, it presents measurements of a prototype implementation that clearly demonstrate the viablility and competitive performance of the remote memory model.

The Virtual Memory Xinu Project investigates a new model of virtual memory in which dedicated, large-memory machines serve as a backing store (page servers) for virtual memory systems operating on a set of (heterogeneous) clients. The dedicated page server allows sharing of the large physical memory resource and provides fast access to data. This paper gives a brief overview of the Virtual Memory Xinu research project. It outlines the new virtual memory model used, the project’s goals, and prototype design and implementation.

Given a set S of n points in the plane such that each point in S is associated with a non negative weight, we consider the problem of computing the single source longest increasing chains among the points in S. This problem is a generalization of the planar maximal layers problem. In this paper, we present a parallel algorithm that computes the single source longest increasing chains in the plane in O(log^2*n) time using O(n^2/log^3 n) processors in hte CREW PRAM computational model. We also have solved a related problem of computing the all-pairs longest paths in an n-node weighted planar st-graph, in O(log^2 n) time using O(n^2 / log n) CREW PRAM processors. Both of our parallel algorithms are an improvement over the previously best known results.

Each federal organization is fully responsible for its copmuter security program whether the security program is performed by in-house staff or contracted out.  Time constraints, budget constraints, availability or expertise of staff, and the potential knowledge to be gained by the organization from an experienced contractor are among the reasons a federal organization may wish to get external assistance for some of these complex, labor intensive activities.