Journal: Communications of the ACM

Abbreviation

Commun. ACM

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

Journal Volumes

ISSN

1557-7317
0001-0782

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Publications 1 - 10 of 56
  • Distributed Selection: A Missing Piece of Data Aggregation
    Item type: Journal Article
    Kuhn, Fabian; Locher, Thomas; Wattenhofer, Roger (2008)
    Communications of the ACM
  • It Takes a Village: Bridging the Gaps between Current and Formal Specifications for Protocols
    Item type: Journal Article
    Basin, David; Foster, Nate; McMillan, Kenneth L.; et al. (2025)
    Communications of the ACM
    Formal specifications have numerous benefits for both designers and users of network protocols. They provide clear, unambiguous representations, which are useful as documentation and for testing. They can help reveal disagreements about what a protocol “is” and identify areas where further work is needed to resolve ambiguities or internal inconsistencies. They also provide a foundation for formal reasoning, making it possible to establish important security and correctness guarantees on all inputs and in every environment. Despite these advantages, formal methods are not widely used to design, implement, and validate network protocols today. Instead, Internet protocols are usually described in informal documents, such as IETF Requests for Comments (RFCs) or IEEE standards. These documents primarily consist of lengthy prose descriptions, accompanied by pseudocode, header descriptions, state machine diagrams, and reference implementations which are used for interoperability testing. So, while RFCs and reference implementations were only intended to help guide the social process used by protocol designers, they have evolved into the closest things to formal specifications the Internet community has. In this paper, we discuss the different roles that specifications play in the networking and formal methods communities. We then illustrate the potential benefits of specifying protocols formally, presenting highlights from several recent success stories. Finally, we identify key differences between how formal specifications are understood by the two communities and suggest possible strategies to bridge the gaps.
  • AZERTY ameliore: Computational Design on a National Scale
    Item type: Other Journal Item
    Feit, Anna Maria; Nancel, Mathieu; John, Maximilian; et al. (2021)
    Communications of the ACM
  • Spin-it: Optimizing moment of inertia for spinnable objects
    Item type: Journal Article
    Bächer, Moritz; Bickel, Bernd; Whiting, Emily; et al. (2017)
    Communications of the ACM
  • Law and Technology Google AdWords and European Trademark Law
    Item type: Other Journal Item
    Bechtold, Stefan (2011)
    Communications of the ACM
  • Human-Centered Cybersecurity Revisited: From Enemies to Partners
    Item type: Journal Article
    Zimmermann, Verena; Schöni, Lorin; Schaltegger, Thierry; et al. (2024)
    Communications of the ACM
    Humans, especially in their role as end users in organizations, have long been considered the weakest link—even enemies—in cybersecurity. This image stems from the perception that, essentially, it is the users who behave insecurely by creating weak passwords, clicking on phishing links, or providing data in insecure networks. Thus, “enemies” here concerns insecure behaviors and policy violations attributed to seemingly thoughtless, careless, or uninformed user actions, not necessarily malicious activities from attackers or hostile insiders. Previous measures to tackle the supposed enemy end user can be clustered into constraining approaches, which aim to limit human influence and thus potential error. Yet, despite technical and process controls, organizations still must rely heavily on human interaction with technical systems. This gave rise to considering approaches, which try to increase the usability of security technologies38 by reducing errors, insecure workarounds, and security-usability trade-offs. But even with these efforts, security attacks targeting humans, such as phishing attacks that exploit cognitive biases and heuristics, are at an unprecedented high17 and becoming increasingly sophisticated. And not only is the number of reported incidents rising, but even more so the financial losses associated with them.17 It is therefore clear that human cognition and behavior play an important role in coping with persistent and quickly evolving security threats, demanding new pathways.
  • Computing history beyond the U.K. And U.S.: Selected landmarks from continental Europe
    Item type: Journal Article
    Bruderer, Herbert (2017)
    Communications of the ACM
  • The Research Value of Publishing Attacks
    Item type: Journal Article
    Basin, David; Capkun, Srdjan (2012)
    Communications of the ACM
  • To PiM or Not to PiM
    Item type: Journal Article
    Falcão, Gabriel; Ferreira, João Dinis (2023)
    Communications of the ACM
    The case for in-memory inferencing of quantized CNNs at the edge.
Publications 1 - 10 of 56