Rare event simulations for safety and security of software

Dynamic Fault Trees (DFT) are widely adopted in industry to assess the dependability of safety-critical equipment (Dynamic Attack Trees are their security counterparts). Since many multi-party or open source software are too large to be studied numerically, DFTs dependability is often analysed using Monte Carlo simulation. A bottleneck here is that too many simulation samples are required in the case of highly reliable systems where components fail seldomly. Rare Event Simulation (RES) provides techniques to reduce the number of samples in the case of very rare events. This course will provide an introduction to the RES techniques by means of model checking, the use of advanced techniques for automated extraction of criticality and importance of dangerous states and its application to safety and security of multi-party and open source software. Students will learn the state of the art of importance splitting automation for RES, including hands-on experience with statistical model checking in a remote server (via SSH, PuTTY, or an equivalent remote shell).