2012 IEEE Reliability Society Student Outreach at the University of Texas at Dallas

W. Eric Wong

Vice President for Technical Activities

ewong@utdallas.edu

http://www.utdallas.edu/~ewong


The Dallas Chapter of the Reliability Society has worked closely with the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Dallas, with additional support from the IEEE Dallas Section &emdash; one of the largest sections in the IEEE &emdash; for the last 3 years to organize a student outreach event each semester. Each event had an invited speaker to give a core presentation on a carefully selected topic that is related to the advances of emerging techniques for the cost-effective production and maintenance of reliable systems and software.

While these events have a special mission to reach out to the UTD students and explain the benefits of joining the Reliability Society, they are also open to the general public and attracted many faculty members in Computer Science, Software Engineering, and Electrical Engineering, as well as engineers from local industry including HP, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin Aeronautics, and Texas Instruments, etc. In addition, President of the Reliability Society Dennis Hoffman and other officers such as Lon Chase also participated and delivered welcoming remarks to the attendees.

This endeavor continues in 2012. For the Spring semester, the student outreach was held on May 4th with Professor Sudipto Ghosh from the Computer Science Department at Colorado State University as the speaker. The focus was on developing effective test cases for large-scale object-oriented software. Although the study of test generation is not new, techniques suitable for industrial-grade software testing are rare. Random test generation is fast, but suffers from lesser effectiveness and lower code coverage compared to systematic test generation. This innovative approach for object-oriented programs combines aspects of both random and systematic test generation in a robust and scalable way. Using a structural design specification and the program to be tested, a set of object configurations conforming to the design are generated, and JUnit tests are created to cover these configurations. A detailed announcement of this talk was posted at the website http://cs.utdallas.edu/news-events/lecture5-4-12a.html.

On the second of November, we had Professor Dianxiang Xu from the National Center for the Protection of the Financial Infrastructure at Dakota State University as the speaker for our 2012 Fall Student Outreach event. The topic of the seminar is on "Model-Based Software Security Testing." Security measures at the network and operating system level (such as cryptography, firewalls, or intrusion detection), lacking knowledge of application-level semantics, have been shown to be insufficient to protect software applications against attack. As such software may introduce significant vulnerabilities, it has been suggested that security be carefully addressed in the early stages of the software development process. However, a rigorous methodology to build such secure software has yet to be proposed. A model-based test generation using threat models and access control models is presented. Executable tests based on threat models are used to verify whether the system is subject to potential security attacks; whereas tests generated from access control models are intended to check that the system has enforced the access control policies. Empirical data suggest that tests so generated can help users detect a majority of security defects.

Attendance at both outreach events was very strong: more than 70 in the Spring semester and close to 40 in the Fall semester. In particular, many students of the graduate course on Software Testing and Verification, and the undergraduate course Software Engineering Project &emdash; a capstone course that every student in Software Engineering is required to take before graduation &emdash; attended the seminars as the subject matter of the colloquia was directly related to the materials they were learning in the class. Of particular note was the high level of audience participation; their engagement and interactivity during the question and answer sessions with the speakers made the proceedings much more enjoyable.

We give our special thanks to the IEEE Dallas Section, the Department of Computer Science, and Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science at UTD for their generous support, as well as students in Professor Eric Wong's research group at UTD for assisting with all the logistics.