Edit and verify

Automated theorem provers are used in extended static checking, where they are the performance bottleneck. Extended static checkers are run typically after incremental changes to the code. We propose to exploit this usage pattern to improve performance. We present two approaches of how to do so and a full solution

Formal proofs about rewriting using ACL2

We present an application of the ACL2 theorem prover to reason about rewrite systems theory. We describe the formalization and representation aspects of our work using the firstorder, quantifier-free logic of ACL2 and we sketch some of the main points of the proof effort. First, we present a formalization of abstract reduction systems and then we show how this abstraction can be instantiated to establish results about term rewriting. The main theorems we mechanically proved are Newman’s lemma (for abstract reductions) and Knuth–Bendix critical pair theorem (for term rewriting).Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia TIC2000-1368-CO3-0

Towards the Integration of an Intuitionistic First-Order Prover into Coq

An efficient intuitionistic first-order prover integrated into Coq is useful to replay proofs found by external automated theorem provers. We propose a two-phase approach: An intuitionistic prover generates a certificate based on the matrix characterization of intuitionistic first-order logic; the certificate is then translated into a sequent-style proof.Comment: In Proceedings HaTT 2016, arXiv:1606.0542

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

Report on the formal specification and partial verification of the VIPER microprocessor

The formal specification and partial verification of the VIPER microprocessor is reviewed. The VIPER microprocessor was designed by RSRE, Malvern, England, for safety critical computing applications (e.g., aircraft, reactor control, medical instruments, armaments). The VIPER was carefully specified and partially verified in an attempt to provide a microprocessor with completely predictable operating characteristics. The specification of VIPER is divided into several levels of abstraction, from a gate-level description up to an instruction execution model. Although the consistency between certain levels was demonstrated with mechanically-assisted mathematical proof, the formal verification of VIPER was never completed