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Presentation

High-Assurance Software

HASLab is focused on the design and implementation of high-assurance software systems: software that is correct by design and resilient to environment faults and malicious attacks. 

To accomplish this mission, HASLab covers three main competences — Cybersecurity, Distributed Systems, and Software Engineering — complemented by other competences such as Human-Computer Interaction, Programming Languages, or the Mathematics of Computing. 

Software Engineering – methods, techniques, and tools for rigorous software development, that can be applied to the internal functionality of a component, its composition with other components, as well as the interaction with the user.

Distributed Systems – improving the reliability and scalability of software, by exploring properties inherent to the distribution and replication of computer systems.

Cybersecurity – minimize the vulnerability of software components to hostile attacks, by deploying structures and cryptographic protocols whose security properties are formally proven.

Through a multidisciplinary approach that is based on solid theoretical foundations, we aim to provide solutions — theory, methods, languages, tools — for the development of complete ICT systems that provide strong guarantees to their owners and users. Prominent application areas of HASLab research include the development of safety and security critical software systems, the operation of secure cloud infrastructures, and the privacy-preserving management and processing of big data.

Latest News

INESC TEC leads digital capacity-building project in AI and HPC

27th July 2023

INESC TEC participates in conference on computer science education

Experts in the fields of education and computing gathered at the Super Bock Arena Auditorium to discuss the challenges associated with integrating computer science education into schools. José Nuno Oliveira, senior researcher at INESC TEC High-Assurance Software Laboratory (HASLab) attended the TNT | The New Trivium conference, which took place on June 3.

04th July 2023

INESC TEC contributes to improving safety in urban mobility

A team of INESC TEC researchers participated in the creation of a solution that aims to improve railway safety through the automatic validation of transport networks. The solution, developed within the scope of the DigiLightRail project - and in partnership with Efacec - focuses on the definition of signalling and interlocking rules, towards reducing accidents in urban mobility caused by failures in signalling systems.   

28th June 2023

INESC TEC develops pioneering research in the application of variational quantum circuits to reinforcement learning

INESC TEC researchers have developed a study that aims to show the feasibility and usefulness of variational quantum circuits in terms of reinforcement learning, using quantum circuits in the central processing unit responsible for automatic decision-making. This is one of the first research papers to prove the impact of variational quantum circuits on the policy-based context, and it was recently published in the journal Quantum Machine Intelligence.  

23rd May 2023

INESC TEC part of European project to promote and facilitate the use of supercomputing in the European ecosystem

The EuroCC2 project started in February; the new European project by INESC TEC aims to identify and address the skills gap in high-performance computing (HPC) in the European ecosystem, and to promote cooperation across Europe, thus ensuring a consistent skills base.

27th February 2023

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Projects

exaSIMPLE

exaSIMPLE: A Hybrid ML-CFD SIMPLE Algorithm for the Exascale Era

2024-2025

Saude24GB

Linha de Saúde 24h da Guiné-Bissau

2024-2024

EPICURE

High-level specialised application support service in High-Performance Computing (HPC)

2024-2028

TwinEU

Digital Twin for Europe

2024-2026

HANAMI

Hpc AlliaNce for Applications and supercoMputing Innovation: the Europe - Japan collaboration

2024-2026

ENSCOMP3

Ensino de Ciência da Computação nas Escolas 3

2023-2025

AzDIH

Azores Digital Innovation Hub on Tourism and Sustainability

2023-2025

PFAI4_4eD

Programa de Formação Avançada Industria 4 - 4a edição

2023-2023

ATE

Alliance for Energy Transition

2023-2025

Green_Dat_AI

Energy-efficient AI-ready Data Spaces

2023-2025

EuroCC2

National Competence Centres in the framework of EuroHPC Phase 2

2023-2025

fMP

Formação de Introdução à utilização de recursos HPC (Técnicas básicas de Programação Paralela)

2022-2022

AURORA

Deteção de atividade no interior do veículo

2022-2023

NewSpacePortugal

Agenda New Space Portugal

2022-2025

ATTRACT_DIH

Digital Innovation Hub for Artificial Intelligence and High-Performance Computing

2022-2025

BeFlexible

Boosting engagement to increase flexibility

2022-2026

ENERSHARE

European commoN EneRgy dataSpace framework enabling data sHaring-driven Across- and beyond- eneRgy sErvices

2022-2025

Gridsoft

Parecer sobre a implementação de software para redes elétricas inteligentes

2022-2022

PFAI4_3ed

Programa de Formação Avançada Industria 4 - 3a edição

2022-2022

THEIA

Automated Perception Driving

2022-2023

SpecRep

Constraint-based Specification Repair

2022-2023

IBEX

Métodos quantitativos para a programação ciber-física: Uma abordagem precisa para racicionar sobre imprecisões na computação ciber-física

2022-2024

FLEXCOMM

Towards Energy-aware Communications: Connecting the power grid and communication infrastructure

2022-2023

STDCNCS

Desenvolvimento de estudo sobre a comunidade de cibersegurança em Portugal, no âmbito do Observatório de Cibersegurança

2021-2023

Sustainable HPC

Computação de elevado desempenho sustentável

2021-2025

CircThread

Building the Digital Thread for Circular Economy Product, Resource & Service Management

2021-2025

PassCert

Exploring the Impact of Formal Verification on the Adoption of Password Security Software

2021-2022

IoT4Distribuicao

Análise de Requisitos e Especificação Funcional de uma Arquitetura Distribuída baseada em soluções IoT para a Gestão e Controlo da Rede de Distribuição

2021-2023

RISC2

A network for supporting the coordination of High-Performance Computing research between Europe and Latin America

2021-2023

CloudAnalytics4Dams

Gestão de Grandes Quantidades de Dados em Barragens da EDP Produção

2021-2021

PAStor

Programmable and Adaptable Storage for AI-oriented HPC Ecosystems

2020-2021

PFAI4.0

Programa de Formação Avançada Industria 4.0

2020-2021

Collaboration

Collaborative Visual Development

2020-2021

AIDA

Adaptive, Intelligent and Distributed Assurance Platform

2020-2023

BigHPC

A Management Framework for Consolidated Big Data and HPC

2020-2023

SLSNA

Prestação de Serviços no ambito do projeto SKORR

2020-2021

AppOwl

Deteção de Mutações Maliciosas no Browser

2020-2021

InterConnect

Interoperable Solutions Connecting Smart Homes, Buildings and Grids

2019-2024

T4CDTKC

Training 4 Cotec, Digital Transformation Knowledge Challenge - Elaboração de Programa de Formação “CONHECER E COMPREENDER O DESAFIO DAS TECNOLOGIAS DE TRANSFORMAÇÃO DIGITAL”

2019-2021

CLOUD4CANDY

Cloud for CANDY

2019-2019

HADES

HArdware-backed trusted and scalable DEcentralized Systems

2018-2022

MaLPIS

Aprendizagem Automática para Deteção de Ataques e Identificação de Perfis Segurança na Internet

2018-2022

SKORR

Advancing the Frontier of Social Media Management Tools

2018-2021

DaVinci

Distributed architectures: variability and interaction for cyber-physical systems

2018-2022

SAFER

Safery verification for robotic software

2018-2021

KLEE

Coalgebraic modeling and analysis for computational synthetic biology

2018-2021

InteGrid

Demonstration of INTElligent grid technologies for renewables INTEgration and INTEractive consumer participation enabling INTEroperable market solutions and INTErconnected stakeholders

2017-2020

Lightkone

Lightweight Computation for Networks at the Edge

2017-2019

CloudDBAppliance

European Cloud In-Memory Database Appliance with Predictable Performance for Critical Applications

2016-2019

GSL

GreenSoftwareLab: Towards an Engineering Discipline for Green Software

2016-2019

Cloud-Setup

PLATAFORMA DE PREPARAÇÃO DE CONTEÚDOS AUDIOVISUAIS PARA INGEST NA CLOUD

2016-2019

CORAL-TOOLS

CORAL – Sustainable Ocean Exploitation: Tools and Sensors

2016-2018

SafeCloud

Secure and Resilient Cloud Architecture

2015-2018

NanoStima-RL1

NanoSTIMA - Macro-to-Nano Human Sensing Technologies

2015-2019

NanoStima-RL3

NanoSTIMA - Health data infrastructure

2015-2019

SMILES

SMILES - Smart, Mobile, Intelligent and Large scale Sensing and analytics

2015-2019

UPGRID

Real proven solutions to enable active demand and distributed generation flexible integration, through a fully controllable LOW Voltage and medium voltage distribution grid

2015-2017

LeanBigData

Ultra-Scalable and Ultra-Efficient Integrated and Visual Big Data Analytics

2014-2017

Practice

Privacy-Preserving Computation in the Cloud

2013-2016

CoherentPaaS

A Coherent and Rich PaaS with a Common Programming Model

2013-2016

Team
001

Laboratory

CLOUDinha

Publications

HASLab Publications

View all Publications

2023

TADA: A Toolkit for Approximate Distributed Agreement

Authors
da Conceição, EL; Alonso, AN; Oliveira, RC; Pereira, JO;

Publication
Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems - 23rd IFIP WG 6.1 International Conference, DAIS 2023, Held as Part of the 18th International Federated Conference on Distributed Computing Techniques, DisCoTec 2023, Lisbon, Portugal, June 19-23, 2023, Proceedings

Abstract

2023

SOTERIA: Preserving Privacy in Distributed Machine Learning

Authors
Brito, C; Ferreira, P; Portela, B; Oliveira, R; Paulo, J;

Publication
Proceedings of the 38th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing, SAC 2023, Tallinn, Estonia, March 27-31, 2023

Abstract

2023

Diagnosing applications' I/O behavior through system call observability

Authors
Esteves, T; Macedo, R; Oliveira, R; Paulo, J;

Publication
2023 53RD ANNUAL IEEE/IFIP INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON DEPENDABLE SYSTEMS AND NETWORKS WORKSHOPS, DSN-W

Abstract
We present DIO, a generic tool for observing inefficient and erroneous I/O interactions between applications and in-kernel storage systems that lead to performance, dependability, and correctness issues. DIO facilitates the analysis and enables near real-time visualization of complex I/O patterns for data-intensive applications generating millions of storage requests. This is achieved by non-intrusively intercepting system calls, enriching collected data with relevant context, and providing timely analysis and visualization for traced events. We demonstrate its usefulness by analyzing two production-level applications. Results show that DIO enables diagnosing resource contention in multi-threaded I/O that leads to high tail latency and erroneous file accesses that cause data loss.

2023

Toward a Practical and Timely Diagnosis of Application's I/O Behavior

Authors
Esteves, T; Macedo, R; Oliveira, R; Paulo, J;

Publication
IEEE ACCESS

Abstract
We present DIO, a generic tool for observing inefficient and erroneous I/O interactions between applications and in-kernel storage backends that lead to performance, dependability, and correctness issues. DIO eases the analysis and enables near real-time visualization of complex I/O patterns for data-intensive applications generating millions of storage requests. This is achieved by non-intrusively intercepting system calls, enriching collected data with relevant context, and providing timely analysis and visualization for traced events. We demonstrate its usefulness by analyzing four production-level applications. Results show that DIO enables diagnosing inefficient I/O patterns that lead to poor application performance, unexpected and redundant I/O calls caused by high-level libraries, resource contention in multithreaded I/O that leads to high tail latency, and erroneous file accesses that cause data loss. Moreover, through a detailed evaluation, we show that, when comparing DIO's inline diagnosis pipeline with a similar state-of-the-art solution, our system captures up to 28x more events while keeping tracing performance overhead between 14% and 51%.

2023

LOOM: A Closed-Box Disaggregated Database System

Authors
Coelho, F; Alonso, AN; Ferreira, L; Pereira, J; Oliveira, R;

Publication
PROCEEDINGS OF12TH LATIN-AMERICAN SYMPOSIUM ON DEPENDABLE AND SECURE COMPUTING, LADC 2023

Abstract
Cloud native database systems provide highly available and scalable services as part of cloud platforms by transparently replicating and partitioning data across automatically managed resources. Some systems, such as Google Spanner, are designed and implemented from scratch. Others, such as Amazon Aurora, derive from traditional database systems for better compatibility but disaggregate storage to cloud services. Unfortunately, because they follow an open-box approach and fork the original code base, they are difficult to implement and maintain. We address this problem with Loom, a replicated and partitioned database system built on top of PostgreSQL that delegates durable storage to a distributed log native to the cloud. Unlike previous disaggregation proposals, Loom is a closed-box approach that uses the original server through existing interfaces to simplify implementation and improve robustness and maintainability. Experimental evaluation achieves 6x higher throughput and 5x lower response time than standard replication and competes with the state of the art in cloud and HPC hardware.

Facts & Figures

1R&D Employees

2020

21Senior Researchers

2016

14Proceedings in indexed conferences

2020

Contacts