A Method for Ontology-based Architecture Reconstruction of Computing Platforms

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel ontology-based method for reconstructing the architecture of computing platforms at the hardware/software boundary, enabling better analysis and maintenance of complex systems.

Contribution

It introduces a generalized architecture reconstruction method using a new ontology, PLATOnt, applicable to diverse HW/SW systems, inspired by the Symphony AR framework.

Findings

PLATOnt ontology outperforms existing ontologies in accuracy

Method successfully reconstructs ARM Trusted Execution Environment architecture

Effective application demonstrated on Raspberry Pi platform

Abstract

Today's ubiquitous computing ecosystem involves various kinds of hardware and software technologies for different computing environments. As the result, computing systems can be seen as integrated system of hardware and software systems. Realizing such complex systems is crucial for providing safety, security, and maintenance. This is while the characterization of computing systems is not possible without a systematic procedure for enumerating different components and their structural/behavioral relationships. Architecture Reconstruction (AR) is a practice defined in the domain of software engineering for the realization of a specific software component. However, it is not applicable to a whole system (including HW/SW). Inspired by Symphony AR framework, we have proposed a generalized method to reconstruct the architecture of a computing platform at HW/SW boundary. In order to cover diverge set of existing HW/SW technologies, our method uses an ontology-based approach to handle these complexities. Due to the lack of a comprehensive accurate ontology in the literature, we have developed our own ontology -- called PLATOnt -- which is shown to be more effective by ONTOQA evaluation framework. We have used our AR method in two use case scenarios to reconstruct the architecture of ARM-based Trusted execution environment and a Raspberry-pi platform have extensive application in embedded systems and IoT devices.