Killing Stubborn Mutants with Symbolic Execution

in ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (in press)

Preventing Overloading Incidents on Smart Grids: A Multiobjective Combinatorial Optimization Approach

in Communications in Computer and Information Science (2020, February 15)

Cable overloading is one of the most critical disturbances that may occur in smart grids, as it can cause damage to the distribution power lines. Therefore, the circuits are protected by fuses so that ... [more ▼]

Cable overloading is one of the most critical disturbances that may occur in smart grids, as it can cause damage to the distribution power lines. Therefore, the circuits are protected by fuses so that, the overload could trip the fuse, opening the circuit, and stopping the flow and heating. However, sustained overloads, even if they are below the safety limits, could also damage the wires. To prevent overload, smart grid operators can switch the fuses on or off to protect the circuits, or remotely curtail the over-producing/over-consuming users. Nevertheless, making the most appropriate decision is a daunting decision-making task, notably due to contractual and technical obligations. In this paper, we define and formulate the overloading prevention problem as a Multiobjective Mixed Integer Quadratically Constrained Program. We also suggest a solution method using a combinatorial optimization approach with a state-of-the-art exact solver. We evaluate this approach for this real-world problem together with Creos Luxembourg S.A., the leading grid operator in Luxembourg, and show that our method can suggest optimal countermeasures to operators facing potential overloading incidents. [less ▲]

Adversarial Embedding: A robust and elusive Steganography and Watermarking technique

Scientific Conference (2020)

We propose adversarial embedding, a new steganography and watermarking technique that embeds secret information within images. The key idea of our method is to use deep neural networks for image ... [more ▼]

We propose adversarial embedding, a new steganography and watermarking technique that embeds secret information within images. The key idea of our method is to use deep neural networks for image classification and adversarial attacks to embed secret information within images. Thus, we use the attacks to embed an encoding of the message within images and the related deep neural network outputs to extract it. The key properties of adversarial attacks (invisible perturbations, nontransferability, resilience to tampering) offer guarantees regarding the confidentiality and the integrity of the hidden messages. We empirically evaluate adversarial embedding using more than 100 models and 1,000 messages. Our results confirm that our embedding passes unnoticed by both humans and steganalysis methods, while at the same time impedes illicit retrieval of the message (less than 13% recovery rate when the interceptor has some knowledge about our model), and is resilient to soft and (to some extent) aggressive image tampering (up to 100% recovery rate under jpeg compression). We further develop our method by proposing a new type of adversarial attack which improves the embedding density (amount of hidden information) of our method to up to 10 bits per pixel. [less ▲]

Automated evaluation of embedded-system design alternatives

in Proceedings of the 23rd International Systems and Software Product Line Conference, SPLC 2019, Volume A, Paris, France, September 9-13, 2019 (2019, September)

Multifaceted automated analyses for variability-intensive embedded systems

in Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2019, Montreal, QC, Canada, May 25-31, 2019 (2019, May)

Towards Learning-Aided Configuration in 3D Printing: Feasibility Study and Application to Defect Prediction

in Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Variability Modelling of Software-Intensive Systems, VAMOS 2019, Leuven, Belgium, February 06-08, 2019 (2019, February)

Uniform Sampling of SAT Solutions for Configurable Systems: Are We There Yet?

in 12th IEEE Conference on Software Testing, Validation and Verification, ICST 2019, Xi'an, China, April 22-27, 2019 (2019)

Search-based Test and Improvement of Machine-Learning-Based Anomaly Detection Systems

in ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (2019)

Are mutants really natural? A study on how “naturalness” helps mutant selection

in Proceedings of 12th International Symposium on 
 Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM'18) (2018, October 11)

Background: Code is repetitive and predictable in a way that is similar to the natural language. This means that code is ``natural'' and this ``naturalness'' can be captured by natural language modelling ... [more ▼]

Background: Code is repetitive and predictable in a way that is similar to the natural language. This means that code is ``natural'' and this ``naturalness'' can be captured by natural language modelling techniques. Such models promise to capture the program semantics and identify source code parts that `smell', i.e., they are strange, badly written and are generally error-prone (likely to be defective). Aims: We investigate the use of natural language modelling techniques in mutation testing (a testing technique that uses artificial faults). We thus, seek to identify how well artificial faults simulate real ones and ultimately understand how natural the artificial faults can be. %We investigate this question in a fault revelation perspective. Our intuition is that natural mutants, i.e., mutants that are predictable (follow the implicit coding norms of developers), are semantically useful and generally valuable (to testers). We also expect that mutants located on unnatural code locations (which are generally linked with error-proneness) to be of higher value than those located on natural code locations. Method: Based on this idea, we propose mutant selection strategies that rank mutants according to a) their naturalness (naturalness of the mutated code), b) the naturalness of their locations (naturalness of the original program statements) and c) their impact on the naturalness of the code that they apply to (naturalness differences between original and mutated statements). We empirically evaluate these issues on a benchmark set of 5 open-source projects, involving more than 100k mutants and 230 real faults. Based on the fault set we estimate the utility (i.e. capability to reveal faults) of mutants selected on the basis of their naturalness, and compare it against the utility of randomly selected mutants. Results: Our analysis shows that there is no link between naturalness and the fault revelation utility of mutants. We also demonstrate that the naturalness-based mutant selection performs similar (slightly worse) to the random mutant selection. Conclusions: Our findings are negative but we consider them interesting as they confute a strong intuition, i.e., fault revelation is independent of the mutants' naturalness. [less ▲]

On the impact of tokenizer and parameters on N-gram based Code Analysis

Scientific Conference (2018, September)

Recent research shows that language models, such as n-gram models, are useful at a wide variety of software engineering tasks, e.g., code completion, bug identification, code summarisation, etc. However ... [more ▼]

Recent research shows that language models, such as n-gram models, are useful at a wide variety of software engineering tasks, e.g., code completion, bug identification, code summarisation, etc. However, such models require the appropriate set of numerous parameters. Moreover, the different ways one can read code essentially yield different models (based on the different sequences of tokens). In this paper, we focus on n- gram models and evaluate how the use of tokenizers, smoothing, unknown threshold and n values impact the predicting ability of these models. Thus, we compare the use of multiple tokenizers and sets of different parameters (smoothing, unknown threshold and n values) with the aim of identifying the most appropriate combinations. Our results show that the Modified Kneser-Ney smoothing technique performs best, while n values are depended on the choice of the tokenizer, with values 4 or 5 offering a good trade-off between entropy and computation time. Interestingly, we find that tokenizers treating the code as simple text are the most robust ones. Finally, we demonstrate that the differences between the tokenizers are of practical importance and have the potential of changing the conclusions of a given experiment. [less ▲]