Energy consumption reduction efforts in the residential buildings sector represent socio-economical, technological and environmental preoccupations which justify advanced scientific research. These lead to use inverse models to describe thermal behavior and to evaluate the energy consumption of buildings. Their principal goal is to provide supporting evidence of enhanced energy performances and...

Near field communication (NFC) is a Radio Frequency (RF) technology that allows data to be exchanged between devices that are in close proximity. We formally analyse a hash based NFC mobile coupon protocol using formal methods (Casper/FDR2 ). We discover a few possible attacks which break the requirements of the protocol. We propose solutions to address these attacks based on two different thre...

The automated generation of test cases for heap allocated, complex, structures is particularly difficult. Various state of the art tools tackle this problem by bounded exhaustive exploration of potential test cases, using constraint solving mechanisms based on techniques such as search, model checking, symbolic execution and combinations of these. In this article we present a technique for impr...

Design diversity is a well-known method to ensure fault tolerance. Such a method has also been applied successfully in various projects to provide intrusion detection and tolerance. Two types of approaches have been investigated: the comparison of the outputs of the diversified services without any knowledge of the internals of the server (black box approach) or an intrusive observation of the ...

This paper is devoted to the problem of model building from data produced by a nonlinear dynamical system. Unlike most published works that address the problem from a black-box perspective, in the present paper a procedure is developed that permits the use of prior knowledge about the location of fixed-points in addition to the data thus resulting in a gray-box approach. Numerical results using...

Much of modern cryptography is predicated on the assumption that users have secrets which are generated using perfect randomness, and kept perfectly secret from an attacker. The attacker is then constrained to black-box (input/output) access to the user’s program. In reality, neither assumption holds, as evidenced by numerous side-channel attacks that have surfaced over the last few decades. Th...

Motivated by the quantum algorithm for testing commutativity of black-box groups (Magniez and Nayak, 2007), we study the following problem: Given a black-box finite ring by an additive generating set and a multilinear polynomial over that ring, also accessed as a black-box function (we allow the indeterminates of the polynomial to be commuting or noncommuting), we study the problem of testing i...

We present a new fault exposure and localization approach intended to increase the effectiveness of regression testing. In particular, we extend traditional regression testing, which strongly focuses on black box comparisons, to compare internal program states. These value spectra differences allow a more detailed comparison of executions of the new and old versions of a program. In particular,...

Conformance testing for finite state machines and regular inference both aim at identifying the model structure underlying a black box system on the basis of a limited set of observations. Whereas the former technique checks for equivalence with a given conjecture model, the latter techniques addresses the corresponding synthesis problem by means of techniques adopted from automata learning. In...

This paper makes a first attempt towards improving the testing process in ERP projects by using a metric-based approach [ABU06] based on functional size measurement. The paper reports on how this approach was adapted to a ERP-package-specific project context, how it was applied to five settings in a mid-sized project, and what was learnt of doing it.