Historic

Rock solid, fast, affordable, get it if you can. I had VDSL2 installed by Qwest this past August 3rd. I am a work-at-home IT Specialist. This means I live and die by my Internet connection to communicate with co-workers, gain access to the corporate network, design software and deploy it to servers in different parts of the country. Since the VDSL2 installation almost two weeks ago, the service has been used for web browsing, email, connecting to work through my employer’s VPN service, screen sharing with co-workers, backing up computers via Jungle Disk and Tivoli Storage Manager, listening to Pandora Radio, watching some TV through our Roku player and playing a couple of games of BZFlag. To recap, we are getting 20 Mbps downstream and 5 Mbps upstream. Our residence is in the 80205 zip code and less than 0.5 km from the fiber node. We are qualified for 40 Mbps downstream in this location. The connection has been up continuously since installation and we have yet to experience any network congestion during the day or evening. Here are some metrics from the Q1000: From Jim’s Software Engineering Blog Today I performed a new speed test from Denver to Dallas:

This research paper details some recent concerns regarding DNS services and consumer privacy. This paper summarizes the concepts of DNS. IT discusses how DNS is used on the Internet. It discusses how DNS services are provided to consumers and what types of entities provide the service for daily use. This paper continues with a discussion of how DNS has been and is currently being used as a mechanism to collect and profile the behavior of users on the Internet and how these mechanisms can be abused. The alternatives available to consumers for DNS are presented in closing and suggestions for methods for finding a balance to privacy and utility Internet service are made. DNS is an acronym for Domain Name System. It is one of the most fundamental and important services provided throughout the Internet. Nearly every networked client that uses a symbolic name to access a web server, email server or any other service depends on DNS. The domain name system translates symbolic names like www.ibm.com or mail.google.com into 32-bit Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. DNS also translates IP addresses back into domain names. The translations process from a name to an address is called forward lookup. The translation process from an address back into a symbolic name is called reverse lookup. Forward lookup is used more often than reverse lookup. The DNS concept dates back to 1987. RFC 1034 and RFC 1035 define the concepts, specification and implementation of the domain name system and protocol we use today on the Internet. According to (RFC1034, 2009) the DNS has three major components: domain name space and resource records, which are specifications for a tree structured name space and data associated with the names,name servers are server programs which hold information about the domain tree’s structure and set information and resolvers are programs that extract information from name servers in response to client requests In the simplest form, the servers providing resolution of domain names and addresses are organized into a hierarchy. Resolving a name to an IP address may take many queries across several domain name servers located in different places on the Internet to complete the process. Resolving a domain name to an IP address happens from right to left. For a name such as www.gap.com, the server or servers handling the root domain for .com are queried first. They are queries for the servers of the next component to the left. The .com root servers are queried for the .gap name. The .com servers will return one or more servers that handle the sub-domains for the gap.com domain. The gap.com servers are queried for an address of www within the domain. Through recursive querying of servers from root domain to specific sub-domain, the IP address of www.gap.com is found. Some details have been left out in this example, but this is in essence what happens. Performing this query each time a client asks for the IP of www.gap.com would place too much burden on the communications infrastructure of the Internet, so caching of DNS information happens as well. Domain resolution includes the amount of time from a few seconds to days for that information to remain current. Clients and servers can retain this resolution data in memory until it expires, and then query for it again from the source servers. Caching allows repeated queries for the same domain name to resolve almost instantaneously. Caching of DNS information can happen at several levels of scale, starting at the workstation, the local network and up to the Internet service provider. As mentioned above there are nameservers and resolvers. Nameservers are queried that provide translation from name to address or from address to name. Resolvers are built into our workstations and other Internet-capable devices. A resolver knows the client-side of the DNS protocol that can ask a nameserver to perform a translation. Caching nameservers are a hybrid server that includes both the ability to provide services to resolvers - DNS clients - and act as resolvers to query servers upstream from them to perform forward or reverse resolution. Caching nameservers can be found in consumer firewall devices we use in our homes. They are very often used by large organizations, including Internet service providers as a convenience to their subscribers. The main purpose of caching nameservers is to provide a resolution service closer to the client and reduce the number of queries traveling across the Internet. Caching nameservers are a performance optimization. Internet service providers are the most common providers of caching DNS services that consumers use to query and resolve domain names to IP addresses. You employer, if they have a large enough IT department, may elect to run their own caching DNS system for performance reasons. Your workstation or notebook at the office may be using a DNS server that runs on the local area network. That server queries other servers on the Internet as needed to perform forward and reverse resolution. Recently, several alternative, value-added DNS providers have increased their presence. One of the more popular services is called OpenDNS. In addition to providing name and address resolution services for free, they maintain a system that prevents name resolution of sites known to distribute malware and viruses. They also allow a customer of OpenDNS to tailor what categories of sites on the Internet they will resolve. For example, a parent of a family with young children can elect to prevent OpenDNS from resolving sites with violent or sexually explicit content. Instead of providing an address for the objectionable site, the user’s browser is redirected to page within OpenDNS’ network explaining why they have arrived there. What is important to note here is that a consumer must elect to use OpenDNS and it is implied they understand how the service will behave. Not all consumers are informed or understand how their provider’s DNS service will perform for them. Most consumer DSL and cable routers will pull their configuration from the service provider. That configuration will include one or more addresses of DNS servers. DSL and cable routers will also act as Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol servers for internal networks. The router will provide IP addresses to each client. The router will also do one of two things: provide the DNS addresses to each client that it was provided, or the router will act as a caching nameserver and provide its address to each client as the DNS server. Unless you have taken action to use a different DNS server, there is a good chance you are using the DNS servers supplied by your Internet service provider. The privacy issues for DNS are different depending on whose services are used. Let us assume in a consumer is at home and their default configuration for their Internet connection uses the DNS servers provided by their ISP. The ISP may also be the telephone company and television company of this user. The ISP issues the IP address to the consumer’s cable or DSL router. When queries are made to the ISP’s DNS servers, the source IP address will be that of the customer’s router. Using relational database technology, the sites queried from the home router can be stored and analyzed to form a behavioral profile of this customer’s interests. That information can be used to market new telecommunications products to them, or it can be sold to other businesses or potentially provided to government entities to help understand this family’s patterns of Internet usage. This is possible because of the ability to relate key elements of information - DNS queries, router address, and existing personal data on file - back to a customer and others in the customer’s home. Recently Internet service providers have tried a new approach in using DNS to help generate revenue streams. “Several consumer ISPs such as Cablevision’s Optimum Online, Comcast, Time Warner, Rogers, and Bell Sympatico have also started the practice of DNS hijacking on non-existent domain names, for the purpose of making money by displaying advertisements. This practice violates the RFC standard for DNS (NXDOMAIN) responses, and can potentially open users to cross-site scripting attacks.” (HIJACK, 2009). This technique redirects a user’s browser from an error page to a search page or advertisement page when a non-existent domain name is requested through DNS. There have been documented cases of redirecting legitimate addresses to an alternate web site as well. Most of these approaches require the manipulation of established Internet protocols such as DNS. Not surprisingly, they are met with consumer hostility. According to Kirk (2009), “ISPs are trying to find revenue streams other than simply providing Internet access to subscribers for a monthly fee. Some have investigated behavioral advertising systems, which monitor a person’s Web surfing in order to deliver targeted ads. Those systems have largely failed to take hold due to privacy concerns.” Because the deployments of these DNS and web-based redirection systems require the manipulation of Internet protocols on several levels, some have been found to be vulnerable to manipulation for client exploit and attack. “Kaminsky demonstrated [a] vulnerability by finding a way to insert a YouTube video from 80s pop star Rick Astley into Facebook and PayPal domains. But a black hat hacker could instead embed a password-stealing Trojan. The attack might also allow hackers to pretend to be a logged-in user, or to send e-mails and add friends to a Facebook account.” (Singel, 2008). The unfortunate reality is that there are not many alternatives for DNS available to consumers. The most complicated and method of least disclosure is to run a professional caching DNS server on your local area network and have it query root domains directly. Software such as BIND under UNIX, Linux or BSD, or Microsoft’s domain name server as part of IIS on Windows Server can provide this solution. This approach would eliminate all third-party DNS services from the hierarchy of queries. The next alternative is to research and find the least offensive DNS provider for your needs. This may in fact be your Internet service provider. Research their privacy policy. Test your ISP’s DNS resolution behavior. If you enter a bad domain name in your browser and you are redirected to a “suggestion” page, be suspicious and find out more details. As mentioned above, OpenDNS generates revenue from the profile data it collects from its customers’ use. Their privacy policy (OPENDNS, 2009) is documented on the web site. Additionally, they provide customizable filtering services to protect your network from malware or offensive content. This paper detailed some recent concerns regarding DNS and privacy. In addition to discussing the concepts of DNS, it detailed how and who provides DNS services to consumers. A discussion of how DNS can be leveraged as a mechanism to collect and profile consumer behavior followed with alternatives available to consumers to limit the collection of their behavioral data. Internet service providers are under pressure to increase and discover new avenues of income. Consumers are likewise under constant pressure to maintain their guard against subtle privacy violations. Consumers maintain the ability for now to limit manipulation of Internet standards to prevent unknowingly leaking personal and behavioral information to a wider audience. As discussed in this paper, methods are available to reduce the risk of privacy invasion of consumers without their complete knowledge. References HIJACK. (2009). DNS hijacking. Retrieved August 9, 2009 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_hijacking. Kirk, J. (2009). Comcast Redirects Bad URLs to Pages With Advertising. PC World, Business Center. Retrieved August 8, 2009 from http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/169723/comcast_redirects_bad_urls_to_pages_with_advertising.html RFC1034. (2009). Request for Comments: 1034, DOMAIN NAMES - CONCEPTS AND FACILITIES. Retrieved August 8, 2009 from http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1035.txt. RFC1035. (2009). Request for Comments: 1035, DOMAIN NAMES - IMPLEMENTATION AND SPECIFICATION. Retrieved August 8, 2009 from http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1035.txt. OPENDNS. (2009). OpenDNS Privacy Policy. Retrieve August 7, 2009 from http://www.opendns.com/privacy/. Singel, R. (2008). ISPs’ Error Page Ads Let Hackers Hijack Entire Web, Researcher Discloses. Privacy, Crime and Security Online. Wired. April 19, 2008. Retrieved August 7, 2009 from http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/04/isps-error-page/.

This research paper explores the issues related to defining and quantifying risk and return for capital investments in security solutions for information technology. This work begins by defining some of the most common types of attacks and breaches occurring against commercial and institutional information technology systems. It follows with a discussion of approaches to analyze and estimate the level of financial, legal and reputation risk around IT security events. Finally, the paper concludes by providing guidelines for estimating a budget for IT security initiatives, reporting results and relating the security initiatives to the strategic goals of the organization. There are several types of common security breaches and events in commercial and institutional IT systems. Defacement of web sites involves the compromise of servers responsible for providing web pages. This breach can be caused from improperly configured web server software or flaws in the software responsible for generating dynamic web pages. Web page defacement is often in response to a corporate or political policy. A denial of service attack does not cause of breach in systems, but floods the resources of the target organization. The result of a denial of service attack is to prevent legitimate users from accessing the target’s network and services. A denial of service attack can occur against the networking infrastructure, web servers, database servers or any other finite resource of the organization. A distributed denial of service attack is a network attack that floods the target organization’s network with packets. Like web page defacement, this attack is often in response to a corporate or political policy. Systemic malware attacks involve the spreading of a virus, worm or other malware throughout the workstation resources of an organization. This type of attack is less likely to be directly targeted at a specific organization. It may occur because of a “zero day” vulnerability in workstation software that has not yet been patched by the vendor or blocked by the security software provider. Corruption of information, theft or accidental release of information has the potential for the most attention and the most liability for an organization. This type of breach may involve the release intellectual property, private information about individuals working for the organization, or customers of the organization. Several factors contribute to the decision or requirement for publicizing a security breach. If personal information of employees or clients was released, the organization may be legally required to notify the individuals affected by the breach. In the case of a denial of service attack, customers or business partners of the organization may not be able interact with the IT systems as expected. “[…] unless there is some publicly observable consequence such as shutdown of a Web site or litigation, the press may not become aware of a breach. Thus, some breaches with the most potentially severe economic consequences (such as employee initiated breaches that may compromise proprietary information) may not be reported in a timely fashion.” (Campbell, 2003). There is no established formula and process of determining in advance the amount of risk potential or financial exposure for a security breach. Braithwaite (2002) contrasts the traditional loss estimate model for replacement or recovery of resources with that of today. There is much higher dependence on information technology systems today. In many cases, those systems are the business. The loss from downtime or breach is much larger than the just replacement cost of the physical systems and their corresponding software. It was estimated in 2002 that losses to an online brokerage system could be as high as $6.5 million (US) per hour. A credit-card service bureau could lose as much as $2.5 million per hour. Garg (2003) estimates financial losses to a publicly traded company through decreased trust could be from 0.5 to as much as 1.0% of annual revenues. Based on this simple formula, a company with $1 billion (US) in annual revenues could experience as much as $10 million in loss from a single incident. The cost of a security-related event is far reaching. Repair of the organization’s reputation, legal responsibilities and hardening of IT systems addresses only the issues at the surface. Garg’s estimate includes the cost of the breach plus the resulting impact to the perception of trust by partners, investors and customers. The additional risk to publicly traded companies is the spillover effect to the company’s stock price and long-term investment outlook. Cavusaglu (2004) estimates that an organization can lose as much as 2.1% of its market value on average within two days of reporting a breach to the public. For example, a company with a market capitalization of $100 billion (US) could lose as much as $2 billion in value within a few days after reporting the theft of customer personal information. This amount does not include follow-on investment in technology and process development to remedy the problem, legal costs and investments to repair damage to the organization’s reputation. “These potential costs include: (1) lost business (both immediate and long term as a consequence of negative reputation effects), (2) activities associated with detecting and correcting the breaches, and (3) potential legal liability.” (Campbell, 2003). Publicly reporting a breach in general is not something that negatively influences the view of the company or institution. There is a significant negative response from consumers, partners and investors when the security event is related to the release of confidential information. The estimation of risk related to material, legal and market image damage helps scope the problem of determining budget for information security expenditures. There are several areas of investment to reduce security risk. Braithwaite (2002) describes a security investment approach based on a balanced strategy of prevention, detection and response. A recent trend related to prevention and response is the cyber-insurance policy. These policies provide financial relief to an organization following a security breach. Providers of larger policies often require regular security audits by third parties to help establish the level of risk of a future security problem. “According to the 2006 C5I/FBI Computer Crime and Security Survey, 29 percent of U.S. companies say they have external insurance policies to manage cyber security risks, up from 25 percent in 2005.” (Brody, 2007). However, John Pescatore of Gartner states, “[…] the price of the policies is too close to the cost of an actual event. You may be better off just spending the money to avoid an incident." In determining a budget for IT security expenditures, it is important to identify and place a value on non-quantifiable assets and processes such as intellectual property and customer data. The executive staff needs to be involved in this process and help adjust and agree on the valuation. The valuation needs to be revisited as the organization changes scope and size. Additionally, it is important to identify and place a value on the company’s reputation from a security and trust standpoint. Braithwaite (2002) recommends two areas for consideration that include the adverse impact of publicized incidents involving the company, and how the organization is judged by its involvement in support of national and industry security concerns. As mentioned earlier, Garg’s (2003) estimate of potential revenue loss to the business can be used as a coarse-grained starting point to gauge financial commitment to IT security initiatives. Brandel (2006) makes several recommendations on how to present and maintain funding levels for an IT security budget. Avoid scare tactics with executives. Use past security incidents as reference points within a business case for funding. Plan the organization’s funding requirements for 12 to 24 months into the future. Avoid repeated tactical requests for each security project as that could give an impression of reactionary versus proactive planning. Explain the investments in terms of the business goals and initiatives versus the technical language of security. Estimating and reporting the results of security initiatives can be difficult to articulate. Benefits from security expenditures are indirect. There are no revenue streams from installing firewalls, compartmentalizing network segments or auditing workstations for compliance to IT policies. Brandel (2006) claims, “Investing in security rarely yields a return on investment, so promising [a] ROl will sound ill-informed to a senior executive. […]It’s possible to discuss other benefits of security spending, such as protecting the company’s ability to generate revenue, keep market share or retain its reputation.” Reporting on benefits from past security investments maintains the attention of executive sponsorship. Consider developing metrics using measurements like attacks stopped at the firewalls, viruses scrubbed from inbound emails, the ratio of an outbreak of malware on the Internet compared to the corporate Intranet. Choose metrics carefully and be sure they reflect the business’ goals and language. Investing in and reporting on IT security does not need to be solely focused on preventing exploits, spread of malware or unintended release of confidential information. It can also include high-availability of IT systems, reliability of communications and ensuring integrity of critical business information for ongoing operations. According to Drugescu (2006) metrics must measure organizationally meaningful things, be reproducible and consistent, be objective and unbiased, and measure some type of progression toward the identified strategic goal. This paper analyzed the issues, recent opinions and research related to estimating and quantifying risk and return for IT security solutions. The most common types of security attacks and breaches against commercial and institutional information technology systems were described. A discussion of approaches to analyze and estimate the level of financial, legal and reputation risk around IT security events was provided. This paper provided guidelines for estimating a budget for IT security initiatives, and recommended regular reporting of security metrics and relating those metrics to the business goals of the organization. Day-to-day industry is becoming more dependent on information technology. As each year passes, the transformation of worldwide business to a platform of high-speed connectivity, data storage and Internet service exchanges expands the need to accurately quantify risk from downtime and loss. It is vital to gauge the level of investment in security prevention, detection and response for an organization’s survival in the online, interconnected world. References Brandel, M. (2006). Avoid spending fatigue. Computerworld. April 17, 2006. Pg. 34. Braithwaite, T. (2002). Executives need to know: The arguments to include in a benefits justification for increased cyber security spending. Security Management Practices. September/October 2002. Pg. 35. Brody, D. (2007). Full coverage: how to hedge your cyber risk. Inc. Magazine. April 2007. Pg. 47. Campbell, K., Gordon, L. A., Loeb, M. P., Zhou, L. (2003). The economic cost of publicly announced information security breaches: empirical evidence from the stock market. Journal of Computer Security. 11 (2003) 431–448. Cavusoglu, H., Mishra, B., Raghunathan, S. (2004). A model for evaluating IT security investments. Communications of the ACM. July 2004/Vol. 47, No. 7. Drugescu, C., Etges, R. (2006). Maximizing the return on investment of information security programs: program governance and metrics. Information Systems Security. December 2006. Pg. 30. Garg, A., Curtis, J., Halper, H. (2003). The financial impact of IT security breaches: What do investors think? Information Systems Security. March/April 2003. Pg. 22. Roberds, W., Schreft, S. L. (2009). Data security, privacy, and identity theft: the economics behind the policy debates. Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. 1Q/2009, Economic Perspectives. Pg. 22.

Today our home Internet service was upgraded to VDSL2 from Qwest. We are located in the Whittier neighborhood of Denver - specifically in the 80205 zip code. I was told by Qwest this area is qualified now for up to 40 Mbps downstream and 5 Mbps upstream VDSL2 service. I started with ADSL service about 2 months ago at 7 Mbps downstream and 896 Kbps upstream. I chose to move to the 20 Mbps downstream and 5 Mbps upstream tier. The ADSL service was cut off this morning while work was performed at the fiber node and before 3 PM the installer came by to hook up the new modem. The Qwest installer said my home was less than three blocks from the cabinet. From Jim's Software Engineering Blog The modem connected at the correct speed immediately. Below is a screen snip of the SNR numbers from the Q1000 modem. These numbers are more than double the SNR reported by the M1000 ADSL modem. The ADSL link had a much longer haul over copper than the VDSL2 link. I was surprised to see the 0 dB attenuation in both directions. I had 20-30 dB attenuation with ADSL. From Jim’s Software Engineering Blog The final step before letting the installer loose was to speed test the link back to Qwest. I would call it a success. From Jim's Software Engineering Blog

This paper provides a broad discussion of the security issues related to virtualization technology, such as the offerings by VMware, Microsoft and IBM. It presents an overview of virtualization, the various types of virtualization, and a detailed discussion of full computer virtualization technology. The benefits of virtualization technology are provided from a position of security, convenience and cost. The paper continues with a discussion of the security liabilities of virtualization. It provides examples of recent attempts by security researchers to design attacks directed at the virtual machine manager also known as the hypervisor. A look at trends in the application of virtualization technology concludes the discussion. Virtualization is a type of abstraction of resources. In computer technology, virtualization can be used to simulate the presence of memory, disk, video or entire computers where they exist partially or not at all. The first virtualization technology dates back into 1960, when IBM and other computing pioneers created operating systems and storage systems that presented an isolated environment to the user that appeared as a single-user system. Today our desktop operating systems use memory virtualization to provide a larger runtime space for applications than there is random access memory. Our operating system uses a combination of solid-state memory and a paging file on disk to move data blocks between to two media depending on their frequency of use. Enterprise storage virtualization, such as solutions provided by IBM, EMC and Sun create an illusion of massive consolidated storage space available from solid-state, magnetic disk and streaming tape into a single logical direct access image. Less frequently accessed data blocks are migrated to slower media while often-accessed data blocks are maintained on faster access media. All storage appears online and ready to access. The recent the popularity of virtual machines for running Java and .NET software allow a common runtime environment regardless of the actual hardware and operating system hosting the virtual machine. This approach reduces the work required by the software provider to create a solution capable of running on a variety of platforms. Cardwell (2007) defines computer virtualization as a computer within a computer. Virtualization software simulates a computer, including the processor and hardware components, and BIOS to the guest operating system. The guest operating system running within the virtualized environment should not know or care that its hardware resources are not physical resources, but instead simulated through software. The two types of computer virtualization are called full virtualization and para-virtualization. Wong (2005) discusses the differences of full virtualization and para-virtualization. Full virtualization does not require changes to the guest operating system. Products such as VMware provide full virtualization. This type of virtualization requires support in the host system’s processor to trap and help emulate privileged instructions executed by the guest operating system. Para-virtualization requires modifications to the guest OS to run on the virtual machine manager. Open source operating systems, such as Linux can be modified to support a para-virtualized environment. This type of virtualization often performs better than full virtualization, but is restricted to guest operating systems that have been modified to run in this specific environment. Today there are many popular, contemporary and affordable virtualization products on the market. VMware is the most widely known, but IBM has the longest history with virtualization technologies. As mentioned previously, virtualization for mainframe systems dates back to 1960. VMware has targeted Intel platform virtualization since the 1990s. Microsoft acquired Virtual PC as the market for virtualization grew from VMware’s popularity. Xen is an open source virtualization solution. Xen supports full and para-virtualized systems. It is popular with Linux distributions, which often provide para-virtualized kernels ready to deploy as guest operating systems. IBM’s two primary virtualization platforms are the System-z mainframe and Power systems. “The latest version of z/VM […] will now support up to 32 processors and offer users 128 GB of memory, which will allow the software to host more than 1,000 virtual […] Linux servers.” (Ferguson, 2007). Virtualization technology, which was originally used on centralized systems to share resources and provide a partitioned view to a single user, is popular on server and workstation platforms running Intel x86 hardware. Cardwell (2007) presents several use cases of virtualization benefits, including consolidation of servers, quick enterprise solutions, software development, and sales demonstrations. Separate physical servers running periodically accessed services can be virtualized and run together on a single physical system. Short-lived server systems, such as those for conferences, could be created as virtual machines without the need for acquiring physical servers to host the solution. Software developers often need multiple systems to develop server-based solutions, or they require several versions tools that may conflict when installed together. Sales demonstrations can be configured and distributed to customer-facing staff as virtual machines. Many different configurations can be created and options demonstrated to customers on demand to see how various solutions can apply to their environment. As processing capability increases on the desktop and virtualization providers offer cost-effective software to create virtualized environments, this is a primary growth area for the technology. Burt (2006) says the benefit of mobility of virtual machines for users is a huge benefit of desktop virtualization. Virtual machines stored on portable media such as USB hard disks or flash storage. They can be paused on a host system at an office, taken on plane to the customer’s location and then resumed on a new host. This can happen while keeping the virtualized operating system completely oblivious to its actual location and host hardware. Testing and quality assurance has had large adoption of virtualization technology. According to Tiller (2006), the benefits of virtualization include the ability to react and test vulnerabilities and patches in a much shorter timeframe. Single virtualized systems can be dedicated to an individual task in a network of systems. Upgrading or relocating any virtualized system can be performed without affecting other parts of the entire solution. There is a large benefit to security and availability with virtualization technology. Virtual machines are separated from the host operating system. Viruses, malware and software defects that affect the virtualized system are restricted and, in most cases cannot spread to the host operating system. Disaster recovery planning has the potential for simplification under a virtualized infrastructure. Virtual machines images, such as those used by VMware, are stored on the host operating system as files. Backing-up or relocating virtual machines from one host to another can be as simple as suspending the running virtual machine, moving the set of files across the network and resuming the virtual machine. Virtual machine images can be shortly suspended and stored to tape or mirrored to a remote location as a disaster recovery process. Duntemann (2005) points out that a virtual machine with the operating system and installed applications are commonly stored as disk files and can be archived, distributed, or restored to an initial state using the virtual machine manager. These files are also subject to attack and potential modification if the host system is compromised. A successful attack against the host system can make the virtual machines vulnerable to modification or other penetration. Virtualization is also known as a system multiplier technology. “It is very likely that IT managers will have to increase the number and expertise of security personnel devoted to security policy creation and maintenance as the percentage of VMs increase in the data center.” (Sturdevant, 2008). Where a virus would previously attack a single operating system running on a physical host, a virus can land on the host or any of its virtualized guests. The potential of creating an army of infected systems is possible now with just a single physical host. A Windows operating system running in a virtual machine is just as vulnerable to flaws and exploits as the same operating system running on a physical host. “At a broad level, virtualized environments require the same physical and network security precautions as any non-virtualized IT resource.” (Peterson, 2007). “[…] because of the rush to adopt virtualization for server consolidation, many security issues are overlooked and best practices are not applied.” There are fundamental problems for IT administrators adopting virtualization technology within their labs and data centers. Products such as VMware have internal virtual networks that exist only within the host system. This network allows the virtualized systems and the host to communicate without having the use the external, physical network. The difficulty is that monitoring the internal, virtual network requires the installation of tools that are designed for virtualized systems. Edwards (2009) points out the need for management tools to monitor communication among virtual machines and their host operating system in detail. Each host would require monitoring tools versus a single installation on a network of only physical systems. Discovery and management of virtualized systems will place more burdens on IT staff according to Tiller (2006). The ease with which virtual machines can be instantiated, relocated and destroyed will require a “quantum shift in security strategy and willingness to adapt." As the popularity of virtualization on a smaller scale has increased, a new class of attack on virtual machines and their host virtual machine managers has received more attention. Virtual machines have unique hardware signatures that can be used to identify them and help an attacker tailor an exploit. “As it is, virtualization vendors have some work to do to protect virtual machine instances from being discovered as virtual.” (Yager, 2006). The CPU model and various device drivers loaded by the operating system can identify a virtualized system. In fact, many virtualization vendors supply device drivers for guest operating systems to take better advantage of the virtualized environment. These device drivers are just as susceptible to flaws and vulnerabilities as their non-virtualized counterparts are. The host virtual machine managers, also known as hypervisors are being targeted as well by new types of attacks. Vijayan (2007) points out that dedicated hypervisors, running directly above the hardware of a computer can be used to attack the operating systems and applications it hosts with little or no possibility of detection. The SubVirt research project by University of Michigan and Microsoft uses virtual machine technology to install a rootkit to take control of multiple virtual machines. Finally, attacks using virtualization technology does not require hypervisor or virtual machine manager software at all. Technology present in today microprocessors that is utilized by hypervisors can also be utilized by malware, such as rootkits and viruses to take over a machine at the lowest level of control possible. “Security researcher Joanna Rutkowska presented a proof of concept attack known as ‘blue pill’ in 2006, that she said virtualized an operating system and was undetectable. […] Rutkowska and other have continued with such research, and this year she posited a new attack focusing on hypervisors.” (Bradbury, 2008). Virtualization is not a new to information technology. It dates back to over four decades to the early mainframes and large storage systems to protect and better utilize available computing resources. As this paper discussed virtualization technology, it detailed the kinds, benefits and security liabilities of the technology. Information about the nature of attacks against hosts and guests in a virtualized infrastructure was presented. New virtualization products for modern powerful servers and desktop hardware are helping satisfy the renewed interest in making better use of resources during tightening budgets. The benefits of this updated technology must be weighed against the challenges of securing and protecting the proliferation of virtual machines. Adaptation and transformation of policies and approach within IT organizations must be proactive to stay ahead of the disruptive change currently taking place with virtualization. References Bradbury, D. (2008). Virtually secure? Engineering & Technology. 8 November - 21 November, 2008. Pg. 54. Burt, J., Spooner, J. G. (2006). Virtualization edges toward PCs. eWeek. February 20, 2006. Pg. 24. Cardwell, T. (2007). Virtualization: an overview of the hottest technology that is changing the way we use computers. www.japaninc.com. November/December, 2007. Pg. 26. Duntemann, J. (2005). Inside the virtual machine. PC Magazine. September 20, 2005. Pg. 66. Edwards, J. (2009). Securing your virtualized environment. Computerworld. March 16, 2009. Pg. 26. Ferguson, S. (2007). IBM launches new virtualization tools. eWeek. February 12/19, 2007. Pg. 18. Peterson, J. (2007). Security rules have changed. Communications News. May, 2007. Pg. 18. PowerVM. (2009). IBM PowerVM: The virtualization platform for UNIX, Linux and IBM i clients. Retrieved July 25, 2009 from http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/software/virtualization/index.html. Sturdevant, C. (2008). Security in a virtualized world. eWeek. September 22, 2008. Pg. 35. Tiller, J. (2006). Virtual security: the new security tool? Information Systems Security. July/August, 2006. Pg. 2. Wong, W. (2005). Platforms strive for virtual security. Electronic Design. August 4, 2005. Pg. 44. Yager, T. (2006). Virtualization and security. Infoworld. November 20, 2006. Pg. 16. Vijayan, J. (2007). Virtualization increases IT security pressures. Computerworld. August 27, 2007. Pg. 14.

This research paper explores the use of cryptography in database security. It specifically covers applications of encryption in authentication, transmission of data between client and server, and protection of stored content. This paper begins with an overview of encryption techniques, specifically symmetric and asymmetric encryption. It follows with a specific discussion about the use of cryptography in database solutions. The paper concludes with a short summary of commercial solutions intended for increasing the security of database content and client/server transactions. Whitfield Diffie, a cryptographic researcher and Sun Microsystems CSO says, “Cryptography is the most flexible way we know of protecting [data and] communications in channels that we don’t control.” (Carpenter, 2007). Cryptography is “the enciphering [encryption] and deciphering [decryption] of messages in secret code or cipher; the computerized encoding and decoding of information.” (CRYPTO, 2009). There are two primary means of encryption in use today. They are symmetric key encryption and asymmetric key encryption. Symmetric key encryption uses a single key to encrypt and decrypt information. Asymmetric key encryption, also known as public key cryptography uses two keys - one to encrypt information and a second key to decrypt information. In addition to encryption and decryption, public-key cryptography can be used to create and verify digital signatures of blocks of text or binary data without encrypting them. A digital signature is a small block of information cryptographically generated from content, like an email message or an installation program for software. The private key in the asymmetric solution can be used to create a digital signature of data, while the public key verifies the integrity of data and related digital signature that was created using the private key. The main advantage of public key cryptography over the symmetric key system is that the public key can be given away, as the name implies - made public. Anyone with a public key can encrypt a message and only the holder of the matching private key can decrypt that message. In the symmetric system, all parties must hold the same key. Public key cryptography can be used to verify the identity of an individual, application or computer system. As a simple example, let us say I have an asymmetric key pair and provide you with my public key. You can be a human or a software application. As long as I keep my private key protected so that no one else can obtain it, only I can generate a digital signature that you can use with my public key to prove mathematically that the signature only came from me. This approach is much more robust and less susceptible to attack than the traditional username and password approach. Application of cryptography does not come without the overhead of ongoing management of the technology. In a past interview (Carpenter, 2007), Whitfield Diffie, a co-inventor of public key cryptography says the main detractor from widespread adoption of strong encryption within I.T. infrastructures is key management - the small strings of data that keep encrypted data from being deciphered. Proper integration of cryptographic technologies into a database infrastructure can provide protection beyond username and password authentication and authorization. It can absolutely prevent anyone from reading sensitive data during transmission or stored on media. Some U.S. government standards require the use of encryption for stored and transmitted personal information. Grimes (2006) details the recent laws passed in the United States requiring the protection of personal data. These laws include the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act for protection of consumer financial data, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act for personal health-related data, and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which gives broad legal protection to electronically transmitted data. As discussed above, public key cryptography can be used to authenticate a person, application or computer using digital signature technology. A database management system enhanced to use public keys for authentication would store those keys and associate them with specific users. The client would use their private key to sign a small block of data that was randomly chosen by the server. The client would return a digital signature of that data, which the server could verify using the stored public keys of the various users. A verification match would identify the specific user. The second application of encryption technology in database security is used to protect transmission of data between a client and server. The client may be a web-based application running on a separate server and communicating over a local network, or it may be a fat-client located in another department or at some other location on the Internet. A technology called TLS can be used to provide confidentiality of all communications between the client and server, i.e. the database connection. “Transport Layer Security (TLS) and its predecessor, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), are cryptographic protocols that provide security and data integrity for communications over networks such as the Internet.” (TLS, 2009). Web servers and browsers use the TLS protocol to protect data transmissions such as credit card numbers or other personal information. The technology can be used to protect any data transmission for any type of client-server solution, include database systems. TLS also has authentication capability using public key cryptography. This type of authentication would only allow known public keys to make a connection. This approach is not integrated at a higher level in the solution, such as the application level. Finally, cryptography can be used to protect the entire content of database storage, specific tables or columns of table data. Encrypting stored content can protect sensitive data from access within the database management system, through loss of the storage media, and an external process that reads raw data blocks from the media. The extent to which stored content is encrypted must be weighed against the overhead of encrypting and decrypting data for transaction-intense systems. Britt (2006) stresses the importance of selectively encrypting only those portions of the content that are evaluated to be a security risk if released into the public. He says a “[…] misconception is that adding encryption will put a tremendous strain on database performance during queries and loads.” This type of protection often uses symmetric key encryption because it is much faster than the public key solution. Marwitz (2008) describes several levels of database content encryption available in Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and 2008. SQL Server 2008 provides the ability to use public key authentication directly in the access control subsystem. Additionally, the entire database server storage, individual databases and table columns can be encrypted using public key encryption. (SQLS, 2009). Table columns, such as those used to store social security numbers, credit card number, or any other sensitive personal information are a good choice for performance sensitive systems. Use of this capability means that the only way to obtain access to the unencrypted data within a column of a database table protected in this manner is to use the private key of an individual who has been granted access. The user’s private key is used to authenticate and gain access to information in the database. Extra protection is gained since the private key is never co-located with the encrypted data. IBM’s DB2 product supports a number of different cryptographic capabilities and attempts to leverage as many of those capabilities that are present in the hosting operating system - Intel-based, minicomputer or mainframe. Authentication to the database from a client can be performed over a variety of encrypted connection types or using Kerberos key exchange. DB2 also supports the concept of authentication plug-ins that can be used with encrypted connections. After authentication has succeeded, DB2 can provide client-server data transmission over a TLS connection and optionally validate the connection using public key cryptography. Like Microsoft SQL Server, the most recent releases of DB2 can encrypt the entire storage area, single databases, or specific columns within the database. (DB2, 2009). This paper provided a broad survey of how cryptographic technologies can raise the security posture of database solutions. Cryptography is becoming a common tool to solve many problems of privacy and protection of sensitive information in growing warehouses of online personal information. This paper described the use of cryptography in database client authentication, transmission of transaction data, and protection of stored content. Two commercial products’ cryptographic capabilities were explored in the concluding discussion. There are more commercial, free and open source solutions for protecting database systems not mentioned in this paper. As citizens and government continue to place pressure on institutions to protect private information, expect to see the landscape of cryptographic technologies for database management systems expand. References Britt, P. (2006). The encryption code. Information Today. March 2006, vol. 23, issue 3. Carpenter, J. (2007). The grill: an interview with Whitfield Diffie. Computerworld. August 27, 2007. Page 24. CRYPTO. (2009). Definition of cryptography. Retrieved 18 July 2009 from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cryptography. DB2. (2009). DB2 Security Model Overview. Retrieved 18 July 2009 from http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/db2luw/v9r7/topic/com.ibm.db2.luw.admin.sec.doc/doc/c0021804.html. Grimes, R. A. (2006). End-to-end encryption strategies. Infoworld. September 4, 2006. Page 31. Marwitz, C. (2008). Database encryption solutions: protect your databases - and your company - from attacks and leaks. SQL Server Magazine. September 2008. SQLS. (2009). Cryptography in SQL Server. Retrieved 18 July 2009 from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc837966.aspx. TLS. (2009). Transport layer security. Retrieved 18 July 2009 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security.

This research paper explores the use of formal methods in software engineering to design reliable and secure software systems. Formal methods are mathematically focused languages or visual notations to specify behavior, algorithms or other types of program execution while remaining technology independent. This paper provides a brief overview of formal methods and several of the more popular implementations of formal methods in use today for software and systems development. It presents the benefits and drawbacks to formal methods, including reasons why formal methods are not commonplace for all software development. The precision of formal methods provides some opportunity for automation in the software development lifecycle including code generation and automated testing. An exploration of several problem domains where formal methods are often applied is provided. The paper concludes with discussion on the viability of formal methods as a continuing tool of software engineering. Hinchey (2008) defines formal methods as “[…] a specification notation with formal semantics, along with a deductive apparatus for reasoning, is used to specify, design, analyze, and ultimately implement a hardware or software (or hybrid) system.” Formal methods have a relationship to some of the earliest research in algorithms and automated computation. Pure mathematics and symbolic languages were the sole means of algorithmic expression before general-purpose software languages and microprocessors. One such early incarnation of a language for computation was the Turing machine, conceived by Alan Turing in 1936. Turing machines are “[…] simple abstract computational devices intended to help investigate the extent and limitations of what can be computed.” (TM, 2009). Before automated computation was truly possible, many scientific minds were working on ways to direct a computational machine in precise ways. Traditionally, formal methods are used in the specification and development of systems requiring high dependability, such as communication, flight control and life support. Something is dependable if its performance is constant. Reliability is the degree to which something is accurate, stable, and consistent. Security is a guarantee against loss or harm. Hanmer (2007) discusses the relationship between security and dependability, and the common quality attributes of the two when developing a system. He states that something is dependable if it exhibits reliability, maintainability, availability and integrity. Something is secure if it exhibits availability, integrity and confidentiality. The commonality between the two sets is availability and integrity. In the information technology world, the opposite of these two qualities are downtime and inconsistency - something we often see today resulting from informal software specification and lackluster development processes. As mentioned above, formal methods can be applied in the phases of specification, design, implementation or verification of software systems. There is potential use for formal methods throughout the entire development lifecycle. Requirements for software systems typically come from stakeholders in the domain in which the software is used, such as aerospace or finance. Those requirements are provided in human-readable form and need an initial transformation into a more precise language. Software designers can refine the formal specification through a series of iterations and deliver them to developers for implementation. The architecture, functionality and quality attributes of the software can be checked against the formal specifications during peer reviews with other designers and developers. Finally, the teams responsible for testing and verification of the system’s proper operation can use the formal specifications as scripts in developing test suites for automated or manual execution. The specifications from formal methods can be used for more than documentation of a system’s requirements and behavior. The precision in many formal methods allows the utilization of automation to reduce human error and increase consistency in the delivery of the final product. Translation of some or all of formal method languages into general-purpose computer source languages is possible, freeing the developers to concentrate on interesting refinements and optimization of the code, versus laboriously writing every line by hand. Stotts (2002) describes their project in which JUnit test cases were generated from formal method specifications. The automated approach enabled them “[…] to generate more test methods than a programmer would by following the basic JUnit practice, but our preliminary experiments show this extra work produces test suites that are more thorough and more effective at uncovering defects.” The formal methods research team at NASA Langley Research Center has developed a domain-specific formal method language called Abstract Plan Preparation Language. The research team focus and creation of the language is, “[…] to simplify the formal analysis and specification of planning problems that are intended for safety-critical applications such as power management or automated rendezvous in future manned spacecraft.” (Butler, 2006). There are economic disadvantages of applying formal methods in software development projects. Formal methods are typically more mathematically intensive than flowcharts or other modeling notations. They are also more precise and rigorous which result in more time spent expressing the solution using a formal method notation than a visual modeling language. A developer experienced in application-level design and implementation may have less education in computational mathematics required to work with formal method notation. A primary complaint from designers and developers is that the solution must be specified twice: once in the formal method notation and again in the software language. The same argument persists in the visual modeling community, which does embrace the use of model transformation to source code to reduce the duplication of effort. The availability of formal method transformation tools to generate source code helps eliminate this issue as a recurring reason not to use formal methods. Several formal methods are popular today, including Abstract State Machines, B-Method, Petri Nets and Z (zed) notation. Petri nets date back to 1939, Z was introduced in 1977, abstract state machines in the 1980s and B-Method is the most recent from the 1990s. Petri nets are found in the analysis of workflows, concurrency and process control. The Z formal method language is based on notations from axiomatic set theory, lambda calculus and first-order predicate logic. (Z, 2009). It was standardized by ISO in 2002. Abstract state machines resemble pseudo-code and are easy to translate into software languages. Several tools exist to verify and execute abstract state machine code, including CoreASM available on SourceForge.net. Finally, B-Method is a lower-level specification language with a wide range of tool support. It is popular in the European development community and has been used to develop safety systems for the Paris Metro rail line. (BMETH, 2009). The use of formal methods as a way of increasing software dependability and security remains strong in industries where even partial failure can result in unacceptable loss of money, time and most importantly, life. The choice of applying formal methods in a development project is often an economic, risk-based decision. There will continue to be application programs without the budget or convenience of time to add the extra process and labor required to transform requirements into formal method specifications and then into source code. However, the pattern of formal method use remains consistent in safety and security critical systems. The development and refinement of formal methods continues into this decade, most recently with the standardization of the Z method by ISO. The activity surrounding tooling and automation to support formal methods in during the development lifecycle appears to be growing. Perhaps the software industry is closing on a point of balance among formality in specification, time to market and automation in solution development. References ASM. (2009). Abstract State Machines. Retrieved 11 July 2009 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_State_Machines. BMETH. (2009). B-Method. Retrieved 11 July 2009 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-Method. Butler, R. W. (2006). An Abstract Plan Preparation Language. NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, Virginia. NASA/TM-2006-214518. Retrieved 11 July 2009 from http://shemesh.larc.nasa.gov/fm/papers/Butler-TM-2006-214518-Abstract-Plan.pdf. Hanmer, R. S., McBride, D. T., Mendiratta, V. B. (2007). Comparing Reliability and Security: Concepts, Requirements, and Techniques. Bell Labs Technical Journal 12(3), 65–78 (2007). Hinchey, M., Jackson, M., Cousot, P., Cook, B., Bowen, J. P., Margaria, T. (2008). Software Engineering and Formal Methods. Communications of the ACM, 51(9). September 2008. TM. (2009). Turing machine. Retrieved 11 July 2009 from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing-machine/. Stotts, D., Lindsey, M., Antley, A. (2002). An Informal Formal Method for Systematic JUnit Test Case Generation. Technical Report TR02-012. Department of Computer Science, Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Retrieved 11 July 2009 from http://rockfish.cs.unc.edu/pubs/TR02-012.pdf. Z. (2009). Z notation. Retrieved 11 July 2009 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_notation.

This project will apply Unified Modeling Language for the visual definition of data transformation rules for directing the execution of data migration from one or more source information repositories to a target information repository and will result in a UML profile optimized for defining data transformation and migration among repositories. I believe that a visual approach to specifying and maintaining the rules of data movement between the source and target repositories will decrease the time required to define these rules, enable less technical individuals to adopt, and provide a motivation to reuse these models to accelerate future migration and consolidation efforts.Problem Statement and BackgroundMy role in this project includes project planning and task management, primary researcher and developer of the deliverables of the project. My technical background includes being a certified OOAD designer in Unified Modeling Language by IBM and a software engineer for nearly two decades. I recently have been involved in the migration of several custom knowledge data repositories to an installation of IBM Rational Asset Manager.This project will use a constructive ontology and epistemology to create a new solution in the problem space of the project. This is the most appropriate research ontology and epistemology because there is little precedence available in the exactly this area of research. Visually modeling program specifications have been studied in other problem domains and continue to be an area of interest. This particular problem space is unique, relatively untouched, and in an area of considerable interest to me. A possible constraint of the project includes shortcomings of the UML metamodel rules to allow the extension and definition of an effective rules-based data transformation and migration language. A second constraint of the project may be identification of one or more source repositories as candidates for moving to a new system. For the second constraint, one or more simulated repositories may need to be created.This study is relevant to software engineering practitioners, information technology professionals, database administrators and enterprise architects who wish to consolidate data repositories to a single instance. Unified Modeling Language (UML) is primarily used today in information technology to visually specify requirements, architectures and designs of systems, to verify and create test scenarios, and to perform code generation. The UML metamodel was designed to make the language extensible, with the ability to support profiles that allow the language to be customized to support specific problem domains. Researchers and practitioners are finding innovative uses for UML as a visual specification language. Zulkernine, Graves, Umair and Khan (2007) recently published their results in using UML to visually specify rules for a network intrusion detection system. Devos and Steegmans (2005) also published their results in using Unified Modeling Language in tandem with Object Constraint Language to specify business process rules with validation and error checking.This project will contribute to at least two fields of information technology: visual modeling languages, and information consolidation and management. This project will make a unique contribution to the subject area of domain-specific visual languages for the definition of rules. Additionally, a successful outcome from this project will contribute to knowledge in the area of lowering complexity of consolidating repositories to save operations costs and increase modernization of data access systems. An opposing approach to this project would be a federated solution to data consolidation. A federated solution would continue to maintain multiple data repositories and connect their operations via programming interfaces so that clients could access them and combine their data to create the appearance of a unified source.The project area of focus was motivated by my desire to create a visual system for complete migration of a source repository of technical data, such as a technical support knowledge base, to a new product called Rational Asset Manager. My overall goal was to drive the entire migration visually using a single model specification. This specification would visually specify the rules in migrating and transforming data from one system to another as well as visually select the technical mechanisms used to communicate with each information repository, such as SQL databases, web services, XML translation, etc. In addition, I wanted to generate some executable code from the models that would carry out some or all of the movement of data between repositories. In scaling this broad problem area down, I decided to focus on using the model as a specification that would be read by an existing program to carry out the instructions in the model. This program already exists, but does not yet know how to read models. Finally, in focusing on a specific part of the visual specification, I decided to focus on an aspect of the model that locates data from one system, potentially re-maps it or transforms it, and places it into the target system. The final initial research focus would take the form of a UML profile that could be used to specify this aspect of the solution and extend the existing migration program to use the model to perform its work.Project Approach and MethodologyThis project will use a design science methodology to iteratively create, test, and refine the deliverables of the project’s outcome. The design science methodology defines five process steps in achieving the outcome of a research project: awareness of problem, suggestion, development, evaluation, and conclusion. This project is currently at the awareness of the problem phase. The inputs to this phase have been my experiences in working within the problem space for the last several years and the secondary research into the problem area performed thus far. I have encountered shortcomings in automation to help accelerate solutions in this problem space. At the same time, I have observed closely related problems overcome using visual and declarative technologies. Additional secondary research is being conducted to understand the body of knowledge associated with this area of visual modeling. The output at this phase is this proposal for a project to develop a visual language to help accelerate solutions in this problem space. Significant elements of the proposal include the overall vision of the project, the risks of the project, tools and resources required to carry out the project, and the initial schedule to complete the project. Following an accepted proposal, the next phase of this methodology is the suggestion phase, which involves a detailed analysis and design of the proposed solution. During the suggestion phase, several project artifacts will be created and updated with new information. Updated artifacts include the project risks and a refined schedule for completion of the project. New artifacts produced at this phase include early UML and migration tool prototypes to explore various technical alternatives, detailed test and validation plans, and most importantly the design plans for the following phase of the project. A significant activity performed at this phase is the acquisition and readiness of the project resources, such as physical labs, input test data from candidate repositories, access to networked systems to acquire the test data, and installation of hardware and software tools.The development phase of the project uses the design plans established in the suggestion phase to focus on construction of the first iteration of the solution. Experiences during this phase also drive refinements to the project schedule, detailed test and validation plans, risks, and the design plan of the solution. The deliverable of this phase is the first generation of the UML profile and extensions to the existing migration tool to support parsing and using models created with the profile. The test specification models are used to move a larger portion of the candidate source repositories to the target repository. After conclusion of this phase, the project may return to an earlier phase to refine plans or project scope based on what is learned during the development of the solution. If acceptable progress is demonstrated at the conclusion of this phase, the project will continue to the evaluation phase.The evaluation phase focuses most of its effort on formal testing and validation of the solution produced in the development phase. The evaluation of the work against the thesis includes working with specific individuals to determine if this is indeed an approach that will save time and simplify the specification of data migration and transformation rules. Documentation of the testing outcome and comparison to the anticipated outcome may cause the project to return to an earlier phase to adjust scope or expectations. If it is decided the project has met its goals, or the goals are not achievable by the project’s approach, the effort will conclude.The conclusion of this project will involve final documentation of the outcome and packaging of all the project’s artifacts for future research studies. The project’s artifact package will be placed in the public location for others to review and use.As mentioned above, this project will require several physical resources and cooperation from technical experts. The study will require access to two or more legacy data repositories as sources for information. The source repositories should ideally utilize different underlying database technologies and implement different information schemas to test variations of the proposed modeling language as it is developed and tested. Access to the technical administrators of the source repositories will be necessary to understand the repositories’ schema and obtain read-only access or a copy of their information. It would be preferred that the repositories be accessed read-only and utilized via a network, or the information is relocated to a computing system directly available to the research project. The study will require at least one server system running IBM’s Rational Asset Manager. This system will act as the target data repository. Data transformed from the source repositories will migrate into Rational Asset Manager, driven by a migration application that uses the visual specifications as direction. The study will also require a single workstation with IBM Rational Software Architect for development of the visual modeling language and extension of the existing migration programs to read the visual models and perform the migration work from the source to target repositories.A requirement of the project’s determination of success is the need to measure the savings in the time to build a migration solution with and without visual specifications. The migration problems need to be varied as well, from simple one-to-one mappings from a single source repository to a single target repository, to more exotic migration scenarios, such as consolidating multiple source repositories to a single target repository and re-mapping values from the source to the target. Additionally, the reusability of previous solutions will be measured as well. This aspect of the project’s outcome will quantify how easily a specification model can be reused from a previous solution.Definition of the End Product of ProjectThis project will produce several artifacts during the project’s life and at conclusion. Most importantly, a UML profile will be developed that can be imported into Rational Software Architect or Rational Software Modeler. The profile will include usage documentation and example models that demonstrate various types of rules that may be specified in a visual model and how that model is read and executed by the migration program. The migration program will be a reference-implementation of an existing tool program that can read the model configured with the UML profile and generates events for extension points on which to act.In addition to technical deliverables, all project planning and process artifacts, such as the project plan, design plan, risks and mitigation notes, test criteria and test result data will be made available. The project will conclude with the development of at least one article or paper for submission to a research journal to document this project’s challenges and achievements, and an annotated bibliography of secondary research related to the project will be provided.If successful, this project will contribute to simplifying part of the process of developing a migration solution without having to recreate the existing tool used today. The project will add a new component to the migration tool and consumers of the tool can choose to use this new component. An assumption made in this research project is that the UML profile developed as a deliverable will be an approachable alternative for less experienced IT professionals and software engineers. This will be a challenge for the project’s results.ReferencesDevos, F., Steegmans, E. (2005). Specifying business rules in object-oriented analysis. Softw Syst Model (2005) 4: 297–309 / Digital Object Identifier (DOI) 10.1007/s10270-004-0064-z.Zulkernine, M., Graves, M., Umair, M., Khan, A. (2007). Integrating software specifications into intrusion detection. Int. J. Inf. Secur. (2007) 6:345–357. DOI 10.1007/s10207-007-0023-0.

Agile software development processes have received much attention from the software development industry in the last decade. The goal of agile processes is to focus the importance of people as primary contributors of the project and reduce the administrative overhead of producing working code for the stakeholders of the project. This paper explores some of the explicit and implied constraints of agile software development processes. It focuses on several common practices of agile processes, particularly those that might limit their adoption by large and geographically distributed organizations. This paper makes recommendations to reduce the barriers to adoption of agile processes by these types of organizations. It attempts to answer questions such as: Is it possible for a large organization with many established business and development processes to incrementally adopt an agile process? Is it possible to adopt agile development processes to work for many individuals who are physically isolated, such as work-at-home software developers? Is it possible to adopt agile development processes to work for a large team, divided into many sub-teams that are geographically distributed and possibly working in different time zones? Extreme Programming is probably one of the most recognized agile software development process today. It was introduced in the late 1990s by Kent Beck and eventually published as a book (Beck, 2005). Beck’s approach documented the values, principles and practices necessary too deliver lower defect, working software with less formal process and more focus on the skills of people and community that produces it. Extreme Programming is targeted to small, collocated teams of about twelve people. Other proponents of agile software development processes understood the increasing interest in their approaches by the software industry and followed with the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. The contributors of the Manifesto were the creators of many different agile, iterative and incremental software development processes. Their goal was to unify principles they shared in common. The work was authored by “[…] representatives from Extreme Programming, SCRUM, DSDM, Adaptive Software Development, Crystal, Feature-Driven Development, Pragmatic Programming, and others […]” (Manifesto, 2001). Beck and Andres (2005) present the primary practices of Extreme Programming in their book. Two practices stand out as a limitation of scaling Extreme Programming to teams in multiple locations, or even work-at-home employees. They are Sit Together and Pair Programming. Sit Together is a practice that encourages the team to work in a unified area, such as a large, open room that promotes easy communication. Pair Programming is a technique where two developers sit together at a single workstation and take turns designing and writing code. As one developer is writing code, the other is observing, asking questions and offering suggestions as the current piece of work progresses. The goal of these two practices is to lower the defect rate through a constantly available communication and collaboration of developers sharing the same physical space. Beck and Andres (2005) also discuss the importance of team size in a project that uses Extreme Programming. They recommend a team size of about twelve people. The reason for this size has as much to do with coordination of development activities as it does with psychological needs of being a part of a team. The larger a team grows, the less personal the connections between team members become. Faces are more difficult to remember and communication among all members gravitates toward infrequency. These challenges with team size become amplified with work-at-home software developers who may only be in the physical presence of other members of the team a few times a year at specific events such as all-hands meetings. Active and regular communication is a requirement with agile software development. Ramesh (2006) describes the perceived advantages of teams distributed across time zones and continuous development, e.g. as one team ends for the day and goes to bed another is coming to work to pick up where the last left off. However, there is actually a communication disconnection between the geographically distributed team in this situation, and the teams are forced into a mode of asynchronous communication, potentially slowing down progress. This problem relates to two principles of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development (2001) that presents a challenge to geographically distributed teams. The first is “Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.” The second is “The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.” Both principles are related to communication among developers, management, stakeholders and users of the project. Lindvall (2004) points out that incremental adoption of agile practices into an existing large organization can be challenging. An existing organization typically has the expectation that existing business and development processes are followed regardless of project size and the process used. Educating those outside of the agile pilot project and resetting their expectations for following the established processes can create tension. A specific example is that development in agile-driven projects usually starts with a subset of the requirements set. This is a quality of agile development processes and has to do with working on what is understood to be the goal of the project today. As working builds are created and delivered to stakeholders the requirements set can be appended and refined until there is agreement that a reasonable goal has been established. Murthi (2002) documents a case of using Extreme Programming on a 50-person development project and cites the ease of starting early with a partial requirements set, and using the subsequent working results for two goals: show stakeholders working software to build confidence in the development team and giving stakeholders something to help refine their own understanding of their needs. Incrementally developed requirements, constantly refined budgeting and burn rate of finances that are typical of agile development process management can present a unique challenge to a project that is completely or partially outsourced. Cusumano (2008) details the need for an iterative contract between the customer and outsourcing provider. A fixed-price contract can be nearly impossible to design when agile development processes are in use by either party. Boehm (2005) also discusses the problem of using agile processes within the realm of contracting to the private and public sector. Problems can be encountered when measuring progress of a contract’s completion. As a consumer following an agile process, the requirements can remain a moving target well into the project’s life cycle. As a provider following agile development processes, it can become nearly impossible to provide final system architectural details early in the life cycle to the consumer for review. Boehm also points out the difficulties to overcome by providers utilizing agile processes when seeking certification for CMMI and ISO-related international standards. The barriers of agile development process adoption by a large or geographically distributed organization can be reduced by a combination of two approaches. The first approach is the application of tooling and technologies to support the practices of agile software development that scale to an organization’s needs. The second approach is to continuously refine the practices in conflict with the organization’s existing mode of operation over time. An example of practice refinement through technology adoption is The Sit Together and Pair Programming practices from Extreme Programming, and working together daily and face-to-face interaction among customers and developers as recommended principles of the Manifesto of Agile Software Development. These practices and principles are the most obvious barrier to adoption of pure agile development processes within a large or geographically distributed team. The essence of the Sit Together practice is to provide a means to communicate at-will among team members. Technologies that help support this practice in distributed environments include instant messaging systems that can provide a mechanism for short question and answer sessions for two or more participants in the project at once. Longer conversations among the team can be supported through VOIP solutions, reservation-less teleconference solutions, Skype and XMPP-based messaging solutions that can allow several team members at a time impromptu contact and discussion opportunities for project issues. Speakerphones allow collocated sub-teams to participate in conversations about the project across geographic locations. In all the examples cited, full-duplex voice communication is essential for effective discussion among several team members at once. This type of communication allows the audio channels to work in both directions simultaneously, which means someone can talk and interrupt someone speaking as they could when they are in person. Many inexpensive speakerphones are half duplex. These types of devices block the receiving audio channel when the person is speaking. Someone wanting to stop the speaker to clarify a point is unable to do so until the person speaking pauses. Background noise, such as a loud computer fan or air conditioner can cause similar problems for half-duplex communication systems. Pair Programming can be performed through a combination of voice communication and desktop screen sharing technology. Individuals working within the same network or virtual private network can use solutions like Microsoft NetMeeting or Virtual Network Computing (VNC) to share, view and work within each other’s development environment and perform pair programming over any distance. Web-based and wide-area-network tooling to support the incremental development and tracking of plans, requirements and defects is available from several vendors such as IBM and Rally Software Development Corporation. Gamma (2005) presented The Eclipse Way at EclipseCon several years ago. The motivation behind his presentation was the many requests he received from users of the Eclipse environment to understand how a team distributed throughout the world could continue to release as planned and with a low defect rate. The Eclipse Foundation has a centralized data center in Canada for several of its activities including continuous integration and automated testing of nightly builds. The build and testing process of the Eclipse environment is fully automated for each platform it supports. Additionally, end-users are encouraged to install and use nightly builds after they pass the automated suite of tests. Other barriers to adopting agile development processes cannot be solved with tooling alone. Ramesh (2006) found that the solution to working across multiple time zones is to synchronize some meetings, and rotate the time of the meeting so that each group takes turns in suffering from an extraordinarily early or late meeting so that everyone on the project can communicate live. Solving the opposing forces in contract negotiating requires creativity. Boehm (2005) recommends disbursing “[…] payments upon delivery of working running software or demonstration of progress rather than completion of artifacts or reviews.” According to Boehm there is not yet a well-defined compatible solution to agility in process and certification of ISO or CMMI related certifications. Lindvall (2004) concluded that adoption of agile development processes by large organizations is best accomplished through hybrid integration with the existing processes, particularly the established quality processes. With this approach, the existing quality processes can be used to measure the effectiveness of the agile software development process under pilot. This paper described several of the qualities shared by different agile software development processes. It focused on those aspects that potentially limit agile process adoption by large and geographically distributed organizations. The recommendations made in this paper include technology solutions to improve collaboration and communication among distributed developers and consumers of the project. The technology considerations also help alleviate management concerns such as incremental planning and budgeting of agile projects. Recommendations were also provided for large organizations with established processes and approaches pilot projects utilizing agile development can take to leverage those processes to demonstrate their value. It is possible to adopt agile software development processes for large and geographically distributed organizations. Adoption requires thoughtful and careful application, integration and refinement of the practices at the core of these agile processes for a successful outcome. REFERENCES Beck, K., Andres, C. (2005). Extreme Programming Explained. Second Edition. Copyright 2005, Pearson Education, Inc. Boehm, B., Turner, R. (2005). Management Challenges to Implementing Agile Processes in Traditional Development Organizations. IEEE Software. 0740-7459/05. Cusumano, M.A. (2008). Managing Software Development in Globally Distributed Teams. Communications of the ACM. February 2008/Vol. 51, No. 2. Gamma, E., Wiegand, J. (2005). Presentation: The Eclipse Way, Processes That Adapt. EclipseCon 2005. Copyright 2005 by International Business Machines. Leffingwell, D. (2007). Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises. Copyright 2007 by Pearson Education, Inc. Lindvall, M., Muthig, D., Dagnino, A., Wallin, C., Stupperich, M., Kiefer, D., May, J., Kahkonen, T. (2004). IEEE Computer. 0018-9162/04. Manifesto. (2001). Manifesto for Agile Software Development. Retrieved 2 October 2008 from http://agilemanifesto.org/. Murthi, S. (2002). Scaling Agile Methods - Can Extreme Programming Work for Large Projects? www.newarchitectmag.com. October 2002. Ramesh, B., Cao, L., Mohan, K., Xu, P. (2006). Can Distributed Software Development Be Agile? Communications of the ACM. October 2006/Vol. 49, No. 10.

As of 2005, the Department of Defense employed over 3 million uniformed and civilian people and it had a combined $400 billion fiscal budget (Coffee, 2005). The war-fighting arm of the government has had enormous buying power since the cold war and the complexity of technologies used in military situations continues to increase. To make the most optimal use of its dollars spent, reduce rework and delays in delivery of complex solutions, the DoD needed to standardize the way providers described and documented their systems. The DoD also needed to promote and enhance the reuse of existing, proven architectures for new solutions. The Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF) is used to document architectures of systems used within the branches of the Department of Defense. “The DoDAF provides the guidance and rules for developing, representing, and understanding architectures based on a common denominator across DoD, Joint, and multinational boundaries.” (DODAF1, 2007).DoDAF has roots in other enterprise architecture frameworks such as Zachman Framework for Information System Architecture (Zachman, 1987) and Scott Bernard’s EA-Cubed framework described in (Bernard, 2005). Zachman and Bernard’s architecture frameworks have been largely adopted by business organizations to document IT architectures and corporate information enterprises. Private sector businesses supplying solutions to the DoD must use the DoDAF to document the architectures of those systems. These suppliers may not be applying concepts of enterprise architecture to their own business, or they may be applying a different framework internally with an established history of use in the business IT sector. The rigor defined in DoDAF version 1.5 is intended for documenting war fighting and business architectures within the Department of Defense. The comprehensive nature of DoDAF including the required views, strategic guidance, and data exchange format also makes it applicable to business environments. For those organizations in the private sector that must use the DoDAF to document their deliverables to the DoD, it makes sense to approach adoption of DoDAF in a holistic manner and extend the use of DoDAF into their own organization if they intend to adopt any enterprise architecture framework for this purpose.The Department of Defense Architecture Framework is the successor to C4ISR. “The Command, Control, Communications, Computers, and Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) Architecture Framework v1.0 was created in response to the passage of the Clinger-Cohen Act and addressed in the 1995 Deputy Secretary of Defense directive that a DoD-wide effort be undertaken to define and develop a better means and process for ensuring that C4ISR capabilities were interoperable and met the needs of the war fighter.” (DODAF1, 2007). In October 2003, DoDAF Version 1.0 was released and replaced the C4ISR framework. Version 1.5 of DoDAF was released in April of 2007. DoDAF solves several problems with the acquisition and ongoing operations of branches within the Department of Defense. Primarily it serves to reduce the amount of misinterpretation in both directions of communication by system suppliers outside of the DoD and consumers within the DoD. The DoDAF defines a common language in the form of architectural views for evaluating the same solution from multiple vendors. The framework is regularly refined through committee and supports the notion of top-down architecture that is driven from a conceptual viewpoint down to the technical implementation.Version 1.5 of DoDAF includes transitional improvements to support the DoD’s Net-Centric vision. “[Net-Centric Warfare] focuses on generating combat power from the effective linking or networking of the war fighting enterprise, and making essential information available to authenticated, authorized users when and where they need it.” (DODAF1, 2007). The Net-Centric Warfare initiative defines simple guidance within DoDAF 1.5 to support the vision of the initiative and guide qualities of the architecture under proposal. The guidance provided within DoDAF includes a shift toward a Services-Oriented Architecture, which we often read about in relationship to the business sector. It also encourages architectures to accommodate unexpected but authorized users of the system. This is related to scaling the solution and loose coupling of system components used in communication of data. Finally, the Net-Centric guidance encourages the use of open standards and protocols such as established vocabularies, taxonomies of data, and data interchange standards. These capabilities will help promote integrating systems into larger, more information intensive solutions. As this paper is written, Version 2.0 of DoDAF is being developed. There is currently no timeline defined for release.DoDAF defines a layered set of views of a system architecture. The view progress from conceptual to technical. Additionally a standards view containing process, technical, and quality requirements constrain the system being described. The topmost level of view is the All Views. This view contains the AV-1 product description and the AV-2 integrated dictionary. AV-1 can be thought of as the executive summary of the system’s architecture. It is the strategic plan that defines the problem space and vision for the solution. The AV-2 is the project glossary. It is refined throughout the life of the system as terminology is enhanced or expanded. The next level of view is the Operational Views. This level can be thought of as the business and data layer of the DoDAF framework. The artifacts captured within this view include process descriptions, data models, state transition diagrams of significant elements, and inter-component dependencies. Data interchange requirements and capabilities are defined within this view. Example artifacts from the operational view include the High-Level Operational Concept Graphic (OV-1), Operational Node Connectivity Description (OV-2), and Operational Activity Model (OV-5). The third level of views of Systems and Services View. This view describes technical communications and data interchange capabilities. This level of the architecture is where network services (SOA) are documented. Physical technical aspects of the system are described in this level as well, including those components of the system that have a geographical requirement. Some artifacts from the Systems and Services View include Systems/Services Interface Description (SV-1), Systems/Services Communications Description (SV-2), Systems/Services Data Exchange Matrix (SV-6), and Physical Schema (SV-11).DoDAF shares many of the beneficial qualities of other IT and enterprise architecture frameworks. A unique strength of DoDAF is the requirement of a glossary as a top-level artifact in describing the architecture of a system. (RATL1, 2006). Almost in tandem with trends in the business IT environment toward Service-Oriented Architectures, DoDAF 1.5 has shifted more focus to a data-centric approach and network presence in the Net-Centric Warfare initiative. This shift is motivated by the need to share operational information with internal and external participants who are actors in the system. This need is also motivated by the desire to assemble and reuse larger systems-level components to build more complex war fighting solutions. As with other frameworks, DoDAF’s primary strength is in the prescription of a common set of views to compare capabilities of similar systems. The views enable objective comparisons between two different systems that intend to provide the same solution. The views enable faster understanding and integration of systems delivered from provider to consumer. The view also allows for cataloging and assembling potentially compatible systems into new solutions perhaps unforeseen by the original provider. The DoDAF view can effect a reduction of deployment costs and lower possibility of reinventing the same system due to lack of awareness about existing solutions. A final unique strength of DoDAF is that it defines a format for data exchange between repositories and tools used in manipulating the architectural artifacts. The (DODAF2, 2007) specification defines with each view the data interchange requirements and format to be used when exporting the data into the common format. This inclusion in the framework supports the other strengths, most importantly automation of discovery and reuse of existing architectures.Some weaknesses of DoDAF can be found when it is applied outside of its intended domain. Foremost, DoDAF was not designed as a holistic, all encompassing enterprise architecture framework. DoDAF does not capture the business and technical architecture of the entire Department of Defense. Instead it captures the architectures of systems (process and technical) that support the operations and strategy of the DoD. This means there may be yet another level of enterprise view that relates the many DoDAF-documented systems within the DoD into a unified view of participating components. This is not a permanent limitation of the DoDAF itself, but a choice of initial direction and maximum impact in the early stages of its maturity. The focus of DoDAF today is to document architectures of complex systems that participate in the overall wartime and business operations of the Department of Defense. A final weakness of DoDAF is the lack of business-financial artifacts such as a business plan, investment plan and return-on-investment plan.It is the author’s observation that the learning curve for Zachman is potentially smaller than DoDAF. Zachman’s basic IS architecture framework method is captured in a single paper of less than 30 pages, while the DoDAF specification spans several volumes and exceeds 300 pages. Zachman’s concept of a two-dimensional grid with cells for specific subjects of documentation and models is easier for an introduction to enterprise architecture. It has historically been developed and applied in business information technology situations. Zachman’s experience in sales and marketing at IBM motivated him to develop a standardized IS documentation method. There are more commonalities than differences in the artifacts used in both DoDAF and Zachman methods. Zachman does not explicitly recommend a Concept of Operations Scenario, which is an abstract flow of events, a cartoon board, or artistic rendering of the problem space and desired outcome. This does not mean a CONOPS (Bernard, 2005) view could not be developed for a Zachman documentation effort. Business process modeling, use-case modeling, and state transition modeling are all part of DoDAF, Zachman, and Bernard’s EA-cubed frameworks. (Bernard, 2005).The EA-cubed framework developed by Scott A. Bernard was heavily influenced by Zachman’s Framework for Information Systems Architecture. Bernard scaled the grid idea to support enterprise architecture for multiple lines of business with more detail than was possible with a two-dimensional grid. The EA-cubed framework uses a grid similar to Zachman’s with an additional dimension of depth. The extra dimension allows each line of business within the enterprise to have its own two-dimensional grid to document their business and IT architecture. Cross-cutting through the cube allow architects to identify potentially common components to all lines of business - a way to optimize cost and reduce redundant business processes and IT systems. The EA-cubed framework includes business-oriented artifacts for the business plan, investment case, ROI, and product impact of architecture development. As mentioned above, DoDAF does not include many business-specific artifacts, specifically those dealing with financials. Both Zachman and EA-cubed have more layers and recommended artifacts than DoDAF. EA-cubed has specific artifacts for physical network level and security crosscutting components, as an example. The Systems and Services view of DoDAF recommends a Physical Schema artifact to capture this information if needed. In the case of DoDAF, vendors may not know in advance the physical communication medium deployed with their system such as satellite, microwave or wired networks. In these cases, the Net-Centric Warfare guidance within DoDAF encourages the support of open protocols and data representation standards.DoDAF is not a good starting point for beginners to enterprise architecture concepts. The bulk of the volumes of the specification can be intimidating to digest and understand without clear examples and case studies to reference. Searching for material on Zachman on the Internet produces volumes of information, case studies, extensions and tutorials on the topic. DoDAF was not designed as a business enterprise architecture framework. The forces driving its development include standardizing documentation of systems proposed or acquired through vendors, enabling reuse of existing, proven architectures, and reduce time to deploy systems-of-systems built from cataloged systems already available. Many of the documentation artifacts that Zachman and EA-cubed include in their frameworks are also prescribed in DoDAF, with different formal names but essentially the same semantics. The framework recommends more conceptual-level artifacts than Zachman. This could be attributed to the number of stakeholders involved in deciding if a solution meets the need. DoDAF includes a requirement for glossary and provides architectural guidance with each view based on current DoD strategy. Much of the guidance provided in DoDAF is directly applicable to the business world. The Net-Centric Warfare strategy, which is discussed in within the guidance, is similar to the Service-Oriented Architecture shift happening now in the private sector. Lack of business-strategic artifacts such as business plan, investment plan, and ROI estimates would force an organization to supplement prescribed DoDAF artifacts with several of their own or from another framework. The Department of Defense Architecture Framework was designed to assist in the acquisition of systems from suppliers. There are many point-in-time similarities between Zachman and DoDAF in terms of DoDAF’s level of refinement for use with large enterprises. DoDAF could potentially benefit from a similar approach as Bernard’s, in that the flat tabular view is scaled up with depth. A extension of DoDAF with a third dimension could be used to document the architectures of multiple lines of business within an enterprise with more detail than is possible with a single artifact set. With minor enhancements, the DoDAF is a viable candidate for business enterprise architecture efforts. ReferencesArmour, F.J., Kaisler, S.H., Liu, S.Y. (1999). A Big-Picture Look at Enterprise Architectures, IT Professional, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 35-42. Retrieved from http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/6294.774792.Bernard, S.A. (2005). An introduction to enterprise architecture. (2nd ed.) Bloomington, IN: Author House.Coffee, P. (2005). Mastering DODAF will reap dividends. eWeek, 22(1), 38-39. Retrieved August 3, 2008, from Academic Search Premier database.Dizard, W. P. (2007). Taking a cue from Britain: Pentagon’s tweaked data architecture adds views covering acquisition, strategy. Government Computer News, 26, 11. p.14(1). 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