From Temporal Models to Property-Based Testing

This paper presents a framework to apply property-based testing (PBT) on top of temporal formal models. The aim of this work is to help software engineers to understand temporal models that are presented formally and to make use of the advantages of formal methods: the core time-based constructs of a formal method are schematically translated to the BeSpaceD extension of the Scala programming language. This allows us to have an executable Scala code that corresponds to the formal model, as well as to perform PBT of the models functionality. To model temporal properties of the systems, in the current work we focus on two formal languages, TLA+ and FocusST.Comment: Preprint. Accepted to the 12th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering (ENASE 2017). Final version published by SCITEPRESS, http://www.scitepress.or

An Enhanced Source Location Privacy based on Data Dissemination in Wireless Sensor Networks (DeLP)

open access articleWireless Sensor Network is a network of large number of nodes with limited power and computational capabilities. It has the potential of event monitoring in unattended locations where there is a chance of unauthorized access. The work that is presented here identifies and addresses the problem of eavesdropping in the exposed environment of the sensor network, which makes it easy for the adversary to trace the packets to find the originator source node, hence compromising the contextual privacy. Our scheme provides an enhanced three-level security system for source location privacy. The base station is at the center of square grid of four quadrants and it is surrounded by a ring of flooding nodes, which act as a first step in confusing the adversary. The fake node is deployed in the opposite quadrant of actual source and start reporting base station. The selection of phantom node using our algorithm in another quadrant provides the third level of confusion. The results show that Dissemination in Wireless Sensor Networks (DeLP) has reduced the energy utilization by 50% percent, increased the safety period by 26%, while providing a six times more packet delivery ratio along with a further 15% decrease in the packet delivery delay as compared to the tree-based scheme. It also provides 334% more safety period than the phantom routing, while it lags behind in other parameters due to the simplicity of phantom scheme. This work illustrates the privacy protection of the source node and the designed procedure may be useful in designing more robust algorithms for location privac

Application of property-based testing tools\\ for metamorphic testing

Metamorphic testing (MT) is a general approach for the testing of a specific kind of software systems -- so-called ``non-testable'', where the ``classical'' testing approaches are difficult to apply. MT is an effective approach for addressing the test oracle problem and test case generation problem. The test oracle problem is when it is difficult to determine the correct expected output of a particular test case or to determine whether the actual outputs agree with the expected outcomes. The core concept in MT is metamorphic relations (MRs) which provide formal specification of the system under test. One of the challenges in MT is \emph{effective test generation}. Property-based testing (PBT) is a testing methodology in which test cases are generated according to desired properties of the software. In some sense, MT can be seen as a very specific kind of PBT.\\ In this paper, we show how to use PBT tools to automate test generation and verification of MT. In addition to automation benefit, the proposed method shows how to combine general PBT with MT under the same testing framework.Comment: Preprint. Accepted to the 17th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering (ENASE 2022). Final version published by SCITEPRESS, http://www.scitepress.or

Resource Efficient Authentication and Session Key Establishment Procedure for Low-Resource IoT Devices

open access journalThe Internet of Things (IoT) can includes many resource-constrained devices, with most usually needing to securely communicate with their network managers, which are more resource-rich devices in the IoT network. We propose a resource-efficient security scheme that includes authentication of devices with their network managers, authentication between devices on different networks, and an attack-resilient key establishment procedure. Using automated validation with internet security protocols and applications tool-set, we analyse several attack scenarios to determine the security soundness of the proposed solution, and then we evaluate its performance analytically and experimentally. The performance analysis shows that the proposed solution occupies little memory and consumes low energy during the authentication and key generation processes respectively. Moreover, it protects the network from well-known attacks (man-in-the-middle attacks, replay attacks, impersonation attacks, key compromission attacks and denial of service attacks)

Testing the speed and accuracy of navigating layouts of web page elements through the use of an eye tracking and speech recognition mechanism

The use of world wide web has increased rapidly over the past few years. In addition, websites covering many topics, are the first source of information. The content of these websites are designed in creative ways to help the web users navigate quickly and easily along with using the input mechanisms. New input mechanisms have been introduced to the field of computer interaction such as mouse, keyboard, touch pad, touch screen and touch pen. Since then computer users have been increasingly using these new techniques to communicate with computers. This tendency pushed computer engineers to come up with more intuitive ways to facilitate interaction mechanism. Moreover, there remains significant demand to meet the needs of physically challenged users in communicating with computers. Furthermore, the traditional methods of navigating websites lack the ability to sense our attention. Hence there must be new alternative input mechanisms to navigate web pages rather than using a mouse and keyboard (KB). Among these mechanisms are the ones that interact with our capabilities, such as voice, and our senses such as sight. This motivated us to think of alternative methods to navigate web pages other than using traditional methods. For this purpose, eight basic layouts of page elements were designed with seven tasks, and each task represented one of the these layouts. Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) techniques and evaluation methods were followed to test the speed and accuracy of navigating the layouts through the use of eye tracking and speech recognition mechanisms.Master of Science (MSc) in Computational Scienc

Primary Renal Synovial Sarcoma Presenting as Haemorrhagic Shock: A Rare Presentation

Primary synovial sarcoma (PSS) of the kidney is considered the rarest type of all renal sarcomas with specific chromosomal translocation t (X; 18) (p11.2; q11.2). We report the case of a 65-year-old man with no medical conditions who presented to the emergency department with sudden severe right flank pain associated with haemodynamic instability and haemorrhagic shock. Computed tomography (CT) of the abdomen and pelvis revealed a right renal mass. A right open radical nephrectomy was performed. Histopathology revealed a monophasic synovial sarcoma. The patient received six cycles of docetaxel and gemcitabine as adjuvant chemotherapy. No sign of recurrence was seen on a follow-up CT urogram. This rare tumour often presents atypically, and clear guidelines regarding appropriate treatment are lacking. Our case showed that treatment with docetaxel/gemcitabine after an open radical nephrectomy is promising

Automated deep bottleneck residual 82-layered architecture with Bayesian optimization for the classification of brain and common maternal fetal ultrasound planes

Despite a worldwide decline in maternal mortality over the past two decades, a significant gap persists between low- and high-income countries, with 94% of maternal mortality concentrated in low and middle-income nations. Ultrasound serves as a prevalent diagnostic tool in prenatal care for monitoring fetal growth and development. Nevertheless, acquiring standard fetal ultrasound planes with accurate anatomical structures proves challenging and time-intensive, even for skilled sonographers. Therefore, for determining common maternal fetuses from ultrasound images, an automated computer-aided diagnostic (CAD) system is required. A new residual bottleneck mechanism-based deep learning architecture has been proposed that includes 82 layers deep. The proposed architecture has added three residual blocks, each including two highway paths and one skip connection. In addition, a convolutional layer has been added of size 3 × 3 before each residual block. In the training process, several hyper parameters have been initialized using Bayesian optimization (BO) rather than manual initialization. Deep features are extracted from the average pooling layer and performed the classification. In the classification process, an increase occurred in the computational time; therefore, we proposed an improved search-based moth flame optimization algorithm for optimal feature selection. The data is then classified using neural network classifiers based on the selected features. The experimental phase involved the analysis of ultrasound images, specifically focusing on fetal brain and common maternal fetal images. The proposed method achieved 78.5% and 79.4% accuracy for brain fetal planes and common maternal fetal planes. Comparison with several pre-trained neural nets and state-of-the-art (SOTA) optimization algorithms shows improved accuracy