MATRIS Members @IWCT

5

Copyright: MATRIS

Description:

This year’s International Workshop on Combinatorial Testing (IWCT 2023) took place in Dublin. MATRIS members contributed to the workshop through six talks by Ludwig Kampel, Manuel Leithner, and Michael Wagner.

The first talk of Ludwig Kampel was an automotive case study on Combinatorial Testing Fault-localization (CT-FLA) methods for Automatic Emergency Braking functions, a collaborative work in the scope of the EU Ecsel project between MATRIS (Dimitris E. Simos, Michael Wagner, and Ludwig Kampel), AVL List GmbH (Mihai Nica, Dino Dodig, and David Kaufmann) and TU Graz (Prof. Franz Wotawa). In this talk, Ludwig Kampel showcased their pioneering work that utilizes CT-FLA methods to screen parameter settings in virtual driving scenarios focusing on identifying the scenario specifications that lead to critical scenarios, such as crashes. While in his second talk, Ludwig Kampel presented a Summary of Locating Hardware Trojans using Combinatorial Testing for Cryptographic Circuits, an extensive case study of a published journal article in IEEE Access. Ludwig explained how to locate hardware Trojans with trigger patterns of lengths up to eight by inserting them in an FPGA board while implementing an AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) algorithm with a 128-bit key length.

Ludwig Kampel
Copyright: MATRIS

Moreover, a Journal-First paper titled “Summary of Combinatorial Methods for Testing Internet of Things Smart-home Systems” was presented. The presentation displayed a detailed creation of a dedicated input parameter model (IPM) for such systems which was then utilized via combinatorial test case generation strategies and also showed the developed automated test execution framework containing two test oracles. Additionally, the presentation highlighted the comparison between findings obtained by combinatorial test sets to those acquired by a random testing approach. While the combinatorial approach offers time-efficient results, all considered approaches performed nearly equally well in pointing to multiple errors and observations in the tested real-world IoT system.

Manuel Leithner presented two further works, “Combinatorial Methods for HTML Sanitizer Security Testing” and “Summary of Combinatorial Methods for Dynamic Gray-Box SQL Injection Testing”.

In the first presentation, Manuel displayed a combinatorial security testing (CST) based approach for detecting bypasses in HTML sanitizers and addressed how to utilize them to filter malicious user-provided HTML input based on a use case-specific configuration that allows or disallows specific HTML elements and attributes. He also showed an example from a real-world medical scheduling application that was utilized as the system under test in cooperation with Mobimed Software GmbH.

In his second talk, Manuel provided a Journal-First summary of a work originally published in Software: Testing, Verification, and Reliability.
Manuel also presented the results that show that our evaluation detects more vulnerable endpoints and produces a greater ratio of executed malicious inputs compared to state-of-the-art testing tools such as w3af, sqlmap, and wapiti.

Manuel Leithner
Copyright: MATRIS

Later, Michael Wagner gave the audience a brief glimpse into “In-Parameter-Order strategies for covering perfect hash families” presenting a Journal-First paper corresponding to a joint work with Charles J. Colbourn from the Arizona State University and Dimitris Simos. The original journal article [CPHF] was published in 2022 in the journal “Applied Mathematics and Computation”, where the authors designed an efficient algorithm to construct Covering Perfect Hash Families, which can be considered a compact representation of certain families of Covering Arrays. In an extensive set of experiments, they managed to construct the smallest known Covering Arrays in the literature for many different instances.

Michael Wagner
Copyright: MATRIS

Overall, the workshop was a great scientific success for the MATRIS Research group, as their talks and presentations were not only well received by the audience but also generated considerable interest from the participants of IWCT and the wider ICST conference. At the end of the workshop day, Dimitris Simos gave positive concluding remarks and shared his view on the future direction of IWCT as part of the Steering Committee Meeting of IWCT.

Related Links:
Locating Hardware Trojans using Combinatorial Testing for Cryptographic Circuits (Ludwig Kampel; Paris Kitsos; Dimitris E. Simos): https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9713898/authors#authors

– Combinatorial methods for testing Internet of Things smart home systems (Bernhard Garn, Dominik-Philip Schreiber, Dimitris E. Simos, Rick Kuhn, Jeff Voas, Raghu Kacker): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/stvr.1805

Combinatorial methods for dynamic gray-box SQL injection testing (Bernhard Garn, Jovan Zivanovic, Manuel Leithner, Dimitris E. Simos): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/stvr.1826

In-Parameter-Order strategies for covering perfect hash families (Michael Wagner, Charles J. Colbourn, Dimitris E. Simos): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0096300322000388

Conference Name:

International Workshop on Combinatorial Testing (IWCT 2023)

Conference Duration:

16 April, 2023

Conference Location:

Dublin, Ireland