Implementation Relations for Testing Through Asynchronous Channels

Hierons, Robert M.

doi:10.1093/comjnl/bxs107

Cited by 9 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…This work has shown that for first-in-first-out (FIFO) channels, it is possible to decide whether there is a test case that is guaranteed to move an IOTS into a particular state as long as the specification is not output-divergent 3 [Hierons 2012a]. It has also defined implementation relations and shown that it is generally undecidable whether a model N of the SUT conforms to a specification M [Hierons 2013]. This latter result, that conformance is undecidable, immediately extends to centralised testing of an SUT that has distributed interfaces since the above result is for the special case where the SUT has only one port.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Combining Centralised and Distributed Testing

Hierons

2014

ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol.

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Many systems interact with their environment at distributed interfaces (ports) and sometimes it is not possible to place synchronised local testers at the ports of the system under test (SUT). There are then two main approaches to testing: having independent local testers or a single centralised tester that interacts asynchronously with the SUT. The power of using independent testers has been captured using implementation relation dioco. In this paper we define implementation relation diococ for the centralised approach and prove that dioco and diococ are incomparable. This shows that the frameworks detect different types of faults and so we devise a hybrid framework and define an implementation relation diocos for this. We prove that the hybrid framework is more powerful than the distributed and centralised approaches. We then prove that the Oracle problem is NP-complete for diococ and diocos but can be solved in polynomial time if we place an upper bound on the number of ports. Finally, we consider the problem of deciding whether there is a test case that is guaranteed to force a finite state model into a particular state or to distinguish two states, proving that both problems are undecidable for the centralised and hybrid frameworks.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Combining Centralised and Distributed Testing

Hierons

2014

ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol.

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“…We are not aware of previous work on formal passive testing where there is an asynchronous communication channel between the system and the monitor, other than ours [19,20,29]. In contrast, there has been some work on active testing and several approaches have appeared in the literature for models where there is a distinction between inputs and outputs [15,16,21,37,45,53].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

A tool supported methodology to passively test asynchronous systems with multiple users

Merayo

Hierons

Núñez

2018

Information and Software Technology

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Context: Testing usually involves the interaction of the tester with the system under test. However, there are many situations in which this interaction is not feasible and so one requires a passive approach in which the system is analysed to look for failures or unexpected behaviours. The entities of a complex system usually communicate in an asynchronous manner and this complicates the testing tasks since the observed order of events need not be the same as the order in which the events were produced. In previous work, we presented a formal passive testing theory for a single user and system communicating through an asynchronous channel. We were able to check that a trace generated by the system satisfies a given property. Objective: This papers extends our work, for detecting potential intrusions and unexpected behaviours, to the case where many users simultaneously communicate with a central server. We evaluate the practical value of the theoretical framework with a non-trivial system. Method: We developed a novel complete theoretical framework to analyse asynchronous systems with multiple users. All the algorithms are fully implemented. Experiments were performed over the Nextcloud platform to show the applicability of our framework. The experiments include an attack so that actual vulnerabilities could be revealed. Results: The application of our methodology, supported by a tool fully implementing it, was able to reveal a vulnerability in the WebDAV protocol running on Nextcloud. Conclusion: The extension of our previous work is not only useful from a theoretical point of view but also increases the applicability of the original work. We are now able to analyse systems where the interaction with different users can lead to unexpected behaviours. We have been able to find a vulnerability in a real system, showing the usefulness of our work.

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“…IOCO does not apply this concept, because there are no standard fault models for IOTSs as in FSM-based testing [8]. Hierons [7] demonstrated that implementation relations for asynchronous communications are undecidable, leading to several consequences such as the impossibility of applying fault domains. However, Hierons showed that implementation relations are decidable for some classes of IOTSs, such as Alternating IOTSs.…”

Section: Test Case Generation In Complete Iocomentioning

confidence: 99%

Complete IOCO test cases: a case study

Paiva

Simão

Varshosaz

et al. 2016

Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Automating Test Case Design, Selection, and Evaluation

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Input/Output Transition Systems (IOTSs) have been widely used as test models in model-based testing. Traditionally, input output conformance testing (IOCO) has been used to generate random test cases from IOTSs. A recent test case generation method for IOTSs, called Complete IOCO, applies fault models to obtain complete test suites with guaranteed fault coverage for IOTSs. This paper measures the efficiency of Complete IOCO in comparison with the traditional IOCO test case generation implemented in the JTorX tool. To this end, we use a case study involving five specification models from the automotive and the railway domains. Faulty mutations of the specifications were produced in order to compare the efficiency of both test generation methods in killing them. The results indicate that Complete IOCO is more efficient in detecting deep faults in large state spaces while IOCO is more efficient in detecting shallow faults in small state spaces.

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Implementation Relations for Testing Through Asynchronous Channels

Cited by 9 publications

References 38 publications

Combining Centralised and Distributed Testing

Combining Centralised and Distributed Testing

A tool supported methodology to passively test asynchronous systems with multiple users

Complete IOCO test cases: a case study

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