CAREER: Software Reliability and Security Risk Assessment: Modeling and Algorithms

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Consistent growth in the software sector of the US and world economies is a driving force for global prosperity and stability in the form of trillions of dollars in revenue and millions of rewarding careers. The spread of computing has increased society's dependence on reliable and secure software to ensure national security and system safety. Producing reliable and secure software is difficult because of its growing complexity, which poses serious challenges to many large companies and government organizations. Quantitative models to assess software reliability and security can assist organizations to deliver software systems on time and within budget.Intellectual merits related to the science of software reliability and security risk management include: multi-stage models to guide software acquisition and integration, multi-phase algorithms that combine numerical techniques to enhance the performance of model-fitting procedures without compromising stability, and an open source application to automatically apply software reliability methods, strengthen collaboration within the international research community, and promote education and dialogue between the research and practitioner communities. The open source application will crowdsource the contribution of models and algorithms, establishing a common platform for participants to implement results, hybridize modeling, and conduct algorithmic research.Multi-stage models will be applicable to scientific phenomenon and engineering activities that are too complex to accurately characterize with standard methods from probability. Multi-phase algorithms will be applicable to model-fitting in the many areas to which statistics is applied. The open source tool possesses the potential to hybridize results from the past 40 years as well as future discoveries, providing insight on how to leverage the international research community. The open architecture will provide a medium for collaboration and rapid research transition in a format that is immediately usable by the intended audience. The open source project is hosted through an Educator account of the GitHub online service (https://github.com/LanceFiondella/srt.core), including sample input data sets for the models developed, the source code of the open source tool, and educational materials. The major research findings will be published in open access journals and also made accessible on the project web site (https://sasdlc.org/lab/projects/srt.html). The project repository will be maintained as long as GitHub educator accounts remain a free online service.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.