In 2024, I attended ICST in Toronto. I went to attend the first "Artificial Intelligence in Software Testing" workshop (AIST), where I gave a tutorial on a potential competition and participated in a panel (which, turned into a roundtable discussion) about the field. Our concerns at the time were principally about...

This one's a reminder for me: if you aren't sure...

It has now been several years since I've taught my own classes, or even acted as a tutor. That is to say: I worked with students after the lockdowns for COVID had ended, but before LLMs changed the nature of our field. I will likely take this mantle up again soon, and I find myself uncertain. Teaching is clearly the...

Times have changed since we were last here. Since then, SSH signing has become popular1, I got some FIDO2 security keys, and post-quantum cryptography has gotten a lot better. It's time for some renovations! SSH authentication We want to prevent connecting to hosts without PQC. To do so, we can simply add the...

I care quite deeply about scientific communication. Part of the frustration that I hold for how we currently communicate in academia is mostly to do with the stiffness and inaccessibility of our horrifically dense, jargon-packed publications. Is it truly necessary to encode all of our works in such a way? In some...

I've updated my website a bit. Visual Changes Those of you who have visited my site will instantly notice that the colours have changed. This is pretty obvious; I prefer the purple/pink ranges nowadays and I suspect they are also easier on the eyes. If that isn't the case for you, let me know and I'll consider...

This semester marks four years since I stopped teaching high school classes. That means that, in just a few months, nearly all of the students that I would have taught have now graduated. I never got to say goodbye to my students. I had to leave rather suddenly and only had the opportunity to talk to one or two...

I am not fond of this recent genenerative AI movement. It is a profound waste of resources, a theft machine masquerading as intelligence, and generally a tool which enables numerous social harms at scale. I am a firm proponent that we (academics) should not be involved in the rat race to improve or to use these...

I'm having a hard time right now. Since I wrote last, there have been multiple additional reasons for me to be frustrated both with my field and my country, but I am choosing to follow the words of the serenity prayer. Instead of throwing myself into frustration forever, I have chosen two alternate routes for...

I often suffer from world-weariness. That aching, inescapable feeling that the world is somehow going wrong and there's nothing that I can personally do about it, and the general sense of emotional and cognitive fatigue that comes with those thoughts. I worry a lot about the world -- watching systems that I once...

Recording. Presentation slides available via Google Slides. Fahrplan entry on CCC website. Blurb Despite how it's often portrayed in blogs, scientific articles, or corporate test planning, fuzz testing isn't a magic bug printer; just saying "we fuzz our code" says nothing about how effectively it was tested. Yet,...

I'm working on building new benchmarking tools for fuzzing. As part of this, we need to snuff out potential sources of measurement bias. One such source is described in 3.6.2 of the fuzzer evaluation guidelines, but I thought I'd reiterate it here with an example. The "unwitting student" statement Suppose that Alex...