The Compass (Constraint Models and Patterns of Software and Security) Group is part of the Software Engineering Research Group at Queen's University.

Our research follows several themes.

Analysis of software to improve security and maintenance.

We investigate how tools can be used to extract information from software and how that information can be used to find security flaws and improve maintenance

Use constraint models to evaluate software and network security.

Network protocols and data files that are read by programs have both syntax and semantics. We investigate how linguistic models can be used to represent the protocols and data and use the linguistic models to detect invalid data (i.e. intrusion detection) or generate invalid data to test the robustness of software.

About Pyxis

Pyxis is a constellation in the southern sky that is named after the magnetic mariners compass (Pyxis Nautica) and is near the constellations that represent the ship Argo of Greek Myth.  It has three stars with known planets.