The use of security patterns has been recognized as effective in mitigating vulnerabilities in software systems. However, it is still not well understood how they can be applied systematically and effectively in concrete systems to achieve the best results. We present a formal approach based on the Alloy model checker to detect information disclosure vulnerabilities and enforce appropriate security patterns automatically. The approach helps improve the overall security posture of software systems while reducing the dependence on manual security analysis. We demonstrate the usability of our approach through the use case of a Smart Meter Gateway. The proposed approach is generic and constitutes a significant advancement toward systematic methods for designing secure software systems.

Faults in safety critical real-time systems are not only logical, but they can correspond to violations of timing constraints. They must be detected to avoid system failures with adverse consequences. Developing efficient fault detection techniques for varieties of system models is still challenging. In this paper, we deal with fault detection for timed finite state machines with timeouts (TFSMs-T). TFSM-T is an extension of FSM to model timing constraints in safety-critical real-time systems. We lift a fault detection approach developed for FSM to generate tests detecting both logical faults and violations of time constraints in TFSMs-T. The approach is based on constraint solving and uses mutation machines to represent domains of faulty implementations (mutants) of a specification TFSMs-T. It also avoids enumerating the implementations one by one. We develop a prototype tool and we conduct experiments to evaluate the scalability of the proposed methods.

Automotive software has been growing in size, criticality and complexity with each new generation of vehicles. Testing at the model and code level is an important step in validating the software against various types of defects that may be introduced in the development process. Model based testing (MBT) methodology, paves a road towards automation of testing activities. Test generation is a computationally complex task, which requires efficient constraint solving techniques and some guidance from the test engineer when this task cannot be solved by a tool. At the same time, automatic tools can hardly substitute domain testing experts which can develop more effective tests or at least test fragments than any tool. This is why we believe that future test generation tools should support "tester-in-the-loop" MBT approaches. In this paper, we provide a brief report on our results in this direction.