Applying Formal Methods to Networking: Theory, Techniques and Applications

Despite its great importance, modern network infrastructure is remarkable for the lack of rigor in its engineering. The Internet which began as a research experiment was never designed to handle the users and applications it hosts today. The lack of formalization of the Internet architecture meant limited abstractions and modularity, especially for the control and management planes, thus requiring for every new need a new protocol built from scratch. This led to an unwieldy ossified Internet architecture resistant to any attempts at formal verification, and an Internet culture where expediency and pragmatism are favored over formal correctness. Fortunately, recent work in the space of clean slate Internet design---especially, the software defined networking (SDN) paradigm---offers the Internet community another chance to develop the right kind of architecture and abstractions. This has also led to a great resurgence in interest of applying formal methods to specification, verification, and synthesis of networking protocols and applications. In this paper, we present a self-contained tutorial of the formidable amount of work that has been done in formal methods, and present a survey of its applications to networking.Comment: 30 pages, submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial

Parallelism in declarative languages

Imperative programming languages were initially built for uniprocessor systems that evolved out of the Von Neumann machine model. This model of storage oriented computation blocks parallelism and increases the cost of parallel program development and porting. Declarative languages based on mathematical models of computation, seem more suitable for the development of parallel programs. In the first part of this thesis we examine different language families under the declarative paradigm: functional, logic, and constraint languages. Functional languages are based on the abstract model of functions and (lamda)-calculus. They were initially developed for symbolic computation, but today they are commonly used in numerical analysis and many other application areas. Pure lisp is a widely known member of this class. Logic languages are based on first order predicate calculus. Although they were initially developed for theorem proving, fifth generation operating systems are written in them. Most logic languages are descendants or distant relatives of Prolog. Constraint languages are related to logic languages. In a constraint language you define a program object by placing constraints on its structure and its behavior. They were initially used in graphics applications, but today researchers work on using them in parallel computation. Here we will compare and contrast the language classes above, locate advantages and deficiencies, and explain different choices made by language implementors. In the second part of thesis we describe a front end for the CONSUL, a prototype constraint language for programming multiprocessors. The most important features of the front end are compact representation of constraints, type definitions, functional use of relations, and the ability to split programs into multiple files

Particpants' Proceedings on the Workshop: Types for Program Analysis

As a satellite meeting of the TAPSOFT'95 conference we organized a small workshop on program analysis. The title of the workshop, ``Types for Program Analysis´´, was motivated by the recent trend of letting the presentation and development of program analyses be influenced by annotated type systems, effect systems, and more general logical systems. The contents of the workshop was intended to be somewhat broader; consequently the call for participation listed the following areas of interest:- specification of specific analyses for programming languages,- the role of effects, polymorphism, conjunction/disjunction types, dependent types etc.in specification of analyses,- algorithmic tools and methods for solving general classes of type-based analyses,- the role of unification, semi-unification etc. in implementations of analyses,- proof techniques for establishing the safety of analyses,- relationship to other approaches to program analysis, including abstract interpretation and constraint-based methods,- exploitation of analysis results in program optimization and implementation.The submissions were not formally refereed; however each submission was read by several members of the program committee and received detailed comments and suggestions for improvement. We expect that several of the papers, in slightly revised forms, will show up at future conferences. The workshop took place at Aarhus University on May 26 and May 27 and lasted two half days

Gems of Corrado B\"ohm

The main scientific heritage of Corrado B\"ohm consists of ideas about computing, concerning concrete algorithms, as well as models of computability. The following will be presented. 1. A compiler that can compile itself. 2. Structured programming, eliminating the 'goto' statement. 3. Functional programming and an early implementation. 4. Separability in {\lambda}-calculus. 5. Compiling combinators without parsing. 6. Self-evaluation in {\lambda}-calculus

Synchronous Digital Circuits as Functional Programs

Functional programming techniques have been used to describe synchronous digital circuits since the early 1980s and have proven successful at describing certain types of designs. Here we survey the systems and formal underpinnings that constitute this tradition. We situate these techniques with respect to other formal methods for hardware design and discuss the work yet to be done

On the engineering of crucial software

The various aspects of the conventional software development cycle are examined. This cycle was the basis of the augmented approach contained in the original grant proposal. This cycle was found inadequate for crucial software development, and the justification for this opinion is presented. Several possible enhancements to the conventional software cycle are discussed. Software fault tolerance, a possible enhancement of major importance, is discussed separately. Formal verification using mathematical proof is considered. Automatic programming is a radical alternative to the conventional cycle and is discussed. Recommendations for a comprehensive approach are presented, and various experiments which could be conducted in AIRLAB are described

Linear Haskell: practical linearity in a higher-order polymorphic language

Linear type systems have a long and storied history, but not a clear path forward to integrate with existing languages such as OCaml or Haskell. In this paper, we study a linear type system designed with two crucial properties in mind: backwards-compatibility and code reuse across linear and non-linear users of a library. Only then can the benefits of linear types permeate conventional functional programming. Rather than bifurcate types into linear and non-linear counterparts, we instead attach linearity to function arrows. Linear functions can receive inputs from linearly-bound values, but can also operate over unrestricted, regular values. To demonstrate the efficacy of our linear type system - both how easy it can be integrated in an existing language implementation and how streamlined it makes it to write programs with linear types - we implemented our type system in GHC, the leading Haskell compiler, and demonstrate two kinds of applications of linear types: mutable data with pure interfaces; and enforcing protocols in I/O-performing functions

Gems of Corrado B\"ohm

The main scientific heritage of Corrado B\"ohm consists of ideas about computing, concerning concrete algorithms, as well as models of computability. The following will be presented. 1. A compiler that can compile itself. 2. Structured programming, eliminating the 'goto' statement. 3. Functional programming and an early implementation. 4. Separability in {\lambda}-calculus. 5. Compiling combinators without parsing. 6. Self-evaluation in {\lambda}-calculus