Related papers: Vbox: Efficient Black-Box Serializability Verifica…

In black-box testing of GUI applications (a form of system testing), a dynamic analysis of the GUI application is used to infer a black-box model; the black-box model is then used to derive test cases for the test of the GUI application. In…

Strong isolation guarantees, such as serializability and snapshot isolation, are essential for maintaining data consistency and integrity in modern databases. Verifying whether a database upholds its claimed guarantees is increasingly…

Transactional isolation guarantees are crucial for database correctness. However, recent studies have uncovered numerous isolation bugs in production databases. The common black-box approach to isolation checking stresses databases with…

Transactional access to databases is an important abstraction allowing programmers to consider blocks of actions (transactions) as executing in isolation. The strongest consistency model is {\em serializability}, which ensures the atomicity…

While a number of weak consistency mechanisms have been developed in recent years to improve performance and ensure availability in distributed, replicated systems, ensuring correctness of transactional applications running on top of such…

Estimating the probability of failure is an important step in the certification of safety-critical systems. Efficient estimation methods are often needed due to the challenges posed by high-dimensional input spaces, risky test scenarios,…

A typical scenario-based evaluation framework seeks to characterize a black-box system's safety performance (e.g., failure rate) through repeatedly sampling initialization configurations (scenario sampling) and executing a certain test…

Today, machine learning (ML) models are increasingly applied in decision making. This induces an urgent need for quality assurance of ML models with respect to (often domain-dependent) requirements. Monotonicity is one such requirement. It…

Cloud DBs offer strong properties, including serializability, sometimes called the gold standard database correctness property. But cloud DBs are complicated black boxes, running in a different administrative domain from their clients;…

According to experts, one third of all IT vulnerabilities today are due to inadequate software verification. Internal program processes are not sufficiently secured against manipulation by attackers, especially if access has been gained.…

Verification is the process of checking whether a product has been implemented according to its prescribed specifications. We study the case of a designer (the developer) that needs to verify its design by a third party (the verifier), by…

Isolation bugs, stemming especially from design-level defects, have been repeatedly found in carefully designed and extensively tested production databases over decades. In parallel, various frameworks for modeling database transactions and…

Code sandboxes have emerged as a critical infrastructure for advancing the coding capabilities of large language models, providing verifiable feedback for both RL training and evaluation. However, existing systems fail to provide accurate…

Black-box adversarial attacks have demonstrated strong potential to compromise machine learning models by iteratively querying the target model or leveraging transferability from a local surrogate model. Recently, such attacks can be…

As API access becomes a primary interface to large language models (LLMs), users often interact with black-box systems that offer little transparency into the deployed model. To reduce costs or maliciously alter model behaviors, API…

Security verification of communication protocols in industrial and safety-critical systems is challenging because implementations are often proprietary, accessible only as black boxes, and too complex for manual modeling. As a result,…

Serializability is a well-understood correctness criterion that simplifies reasoning about the behavior of concurrent transactions by ensuring they are isolated from each other while they execute. However, enforcing serializable isolation…

With the growing interest in deploying robots in unstructured and uncertain environments, there has been increasing interest in factoring risk into safety-critical control development. Similarly, the authors believe risk should also be…

Processes to automate the selection of appropriate algorithms for various matrix computations are described. In particular, processes to check for, and certify, various matrix properties of black box matrices are presented. These include…

The importance of preventing microarchitectural timing side channels in security-critical applications has surged in recent years. Constant-time programming has emerged as a best-practice technique for preventing the leakage of secret…