Workshop on Validating Software for Critical Systems

VSC track brings the opportunity for researchers and developers from industry and the academic world to report the state of the art and exchange ideas about the support that should be provided in order to enforce confidentiality, security, privacy and reliability on the next generation of software technologies. Such a support will enhance the level of quality and of user trust on services involving collaboration with unknown remote parties. 

Nowadays, the widespread use of smart devices, such as smart cards, watches, phones, and tablets, connected by the ubiquitous public Internet network, enables us to easily access a vast range of useful services. Such devices allow people to perform every day activities that either play a role in a collaborative task or are actually supported by some real-time or asynchronous collaboration technology. Example services and applications are messaging, the trading of goods, remote writing or signing of digital documents, activities on social networks or work groups, remotely locating someone/something, and even services improving our ability to observe/control the environment around us. 

In this context, applications that hold or exchange sensitive user data, like personal details, security pin-codes, or biometric data, need special protection against software failures or malicious behavior of downloaded code, that may expose the user to highly undesired consequences, such as threats to confidentiality and even financial or health danger. 

This is even more true since the trend is indeed towards integration, that is, not to have many specialized access devices but a single, multi-purpose host handling many (or all) kinds of user services and its related data together, even though with limited computing resources, such as any small device hosting a Java or .Net run-time environment. 

Moreover, inherent mobility and distribution of these small, open computing devices increases the complexity of the solutions to be adopted for handling secure and reliable execution of untrusted code, in order to ensure the data confidentiality strongly required by the applications. 

As a consequence, new and specially designed techniques can be devised and applied in order to reach the goal of increasing the trust on such a distributed computing environment to a level of strength matching with the high strength of the above safety critical requirements.