Component-based software development is a promising track in software engineering to improve reuse. This paradigm is based on the unanticipated connection of independently developed black-box components. However, any existing proposals enable connections of components based on their state changes notifications without requiring that specific code related to the connection is integrated into com...

The use of Commercial-Off-The-Shelf components in the development of software systems is supposed to result in a reduction of development costs and time by promoting reusability. On the contrary, due to the Black-Box nature they exhibit, the use of COTS products may result in a burden for developers as continuous re-adaptation may be required along the software life-cycle or even at runtime if ...

This paper proposes solutions to two important problems with parallel programming environments that were not previously addressed. The rst issue is that current compilers are typically black-box tools with which the user has little interaction. Information gathered by the compiler, although potentially very meaningful for the user, is often inaccessible or hard to decipher. Second, compilation ...

Computational modellers are not always explicit about their motivations for constructing models, nor are they always explicit about the theoretical implications of their models once constructed. Perhaps in part due to this, models have been criticised as “black-box” exercises which can play little or no role in scientific explanation. This paper argues that models are useful, and that the motiv...

Cryptographic constructions of one primitive or protocol from another one usually come with a reductionist security proof, in the sense that the reduction turns any adversary breaking the derived scheme into a successful adversary against the underlying scheme. Very often the reduction is black-box in the sense that it only looks at the input/output behavior of the adversary and of the underlyi...

Pre/post contracts for higher-order functions, as proposed by Findler and Felleisen and provided in Racket, allow run-time verification and blame assignment of higher-order functions. However these contracts treat contracted functions as black boxes, allowing verification of only input and output. It turns out that many interesting concerns about the behaviour of a function require going beyond...

Uncertainty is very important in risk analysis. A natural way to describe this uncertainty is to describe a set of possible values of each unknown quantity (this set is usually an interval), plus any additional information that we may have about the probability of diierent values within this set. Traditional statistical techniques deal with the situations in which we have a complete information...

Recent research has shown that labeling ontologies can be useful for restricting the access to some of the axioms and their implicit consequences. However, the labeling of the axioms is an error-prone and highly sensible task. In previous work we have shown how to correct the access restrictions if the security administrator knows the precise access level that a consequence must receive, and ax...

Network firewalls are a standard security measure in computer networks that connect to the Internet. Often, ready-to-use firewall appliances are trusted to protect the network from malicious Internet traffic. However, because of their black-box nature, no one can be sure of their exact functionality. We address the possibility of actively compromised firewalls. That is, we consider the possibil...

In black-box testing, the tester creates a set of tests to exercise a system under test without regard to the internal structure of the system. Generally, no objective metric is used to measure the adequacy of black-box tests. In recent work, we have proposed three requirements coverage metrics, allowing testers to objectively measure the adequacy of a black-box test suite with respect to a set...