University of Luxembourg

About: University of Luxembourg is a education organization based out in Luxembourg, Luxembourg. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & European union. The organization has 4744 authors who have published 22175 publications receiving 381824 citations.

Developer Testing in the IDE: Patterns, Beliefs, and Behavior

Abstract: Software testing is one of the key activities to achieve software quality in practice. Despite its importance, however, we have a remarkable lack of knowledge on how developers test in real-world projects. In this paper, we report on a large-scale field study with 2,443 software engineers whose development activities we closely monitored over 2.5 years in four integrated development environments (IDEs). Our findings, which largely generalized across the studied IDEs and programming languages Java and C#, question several commonly shared assumptions and beliefs about developer testing: half of the developers in our study do not test; developers rarely run their tests in the IDE; most programming sessions end without any test execution; only once they start testing, do they do it extensively; a quarter of test cases is responsible for three quarters of all test failures; 12 percent of tests show flaky behavior; Test-Driven Development (TDD) is not widely practiced; and software developers only spend a quarter of their time engineering tests, whereas they think they test half of their time. We summarize these practices of loosely guiding one's development efforts with the help of testing in an initial summary on Test-Guided Development (TGD), a behavior we argue to be closer to the development reality of most developers than TDD.

Block Ciphers Implementations Provably Secure Against Second Order Side Channel Analysis

Abstract: In the recent years, side channel analysis has received a lot of attention, and attack techniques have been improved. Side channel analysis of second order is now successful in breaking implementations of block ciphers supposed to be effectively protected. This progress shows not only the practicability of second order attacks, but also the need for provably secure countermeasures. Surprisingly, while many studies have been dedicated to the attacks, only a few papers have been published about the dedicated countermeasures. In fact, only the method proposed by Schramm and Paar at CT-RSA 2006 enables to thwart second order side channel analysis. In this paper, we introduce two new methods which constitute a worthwhile alternative to Schramm and Paar's proposal. We prove their security in a strong security model and we exhibit a way to significantly improve their efficiency by using the particularities of the targeted architectures. Finally, we argue that the introduced methods allow us to efficiently protect a wide variety of block ciphers, including AES.

The actin cytoskeleton as a therapeutic target: state of the art and future directions.

Abstract: Dynamic processes such as cell migration and division depend on the actin cytoskeleton, a dense meshwork of protein polymers capable of undergoing rapid cycles of assembly and disassembly, under the control of a large number of actin-associated proteins. In cancer cells, structural and functional perturbations of the actin cytoskeleton correlate with higher proliferation rates and uncontrolled movement. Therefore, small molecules that act on the actin cytoskeleton of tumour cells and thus inhibit cell division and movement, may be of high therapeutic value. The dynamic properties of the actin cytoskeleton and the mechanism of action of actin-targeting drugs will be described.