Modelling and verifying IEEE Std 11073-20601 session setup using mCRL2

In this paper we advocate that formal verification should bea part of the development of a communication standard;in a short period of time issues areuncovered that have been in the standard for a number of years, and allsubtleties in the correctness of the protocol are understood.We model and verify the session setup protocolthat is part of the IEEE 11073-20601:2008 standard for communication betweenpersonal health devices.We identify a number of issues present in the standards document.Discussion with a member of the standards committee unveiled that most, but notall, of the identified issues are fixed in the IEEE 11073-20601:2010 version ofthe standard.In addition, the correctness of the protocol, including the fixes, is assessed.For this, properties of the session setup protocol are formulated, and usingthe model checker mCRL2 it is verified whether the model satisfies theseproperties.We show that the session setup protocol is flawed, and propose a straightforwardway to fix this issue

Modelling and verifying IEEE Std 11073-20601 session setup using mCRL2

In this paper we advocate that formal verification should be a part of the development of a communication standard; in a short period of time issues are uncovered that have been in the standard for a number of years, and all subtleties in the correctness of the protocol are understood. We model and verify the session setup protocol that is part of the IEEE 11073-20601:2008 standard for communication between personal health devices. We identify a number of issues present in the standards document. Discussion with a member of the standards committee unveiled that most, but not all, of the identified issues are fixed in the IEEE 11073-20601:2010 version of the standard. In addition, the correctness of the protocol, including the fixes, is assessed. For this, properties of the session setup protocol are formulated, and using the model checker mCRL2 it is verified whether the model satisfies these properties. We show that the session setup protocol is flawed, and propose a straightforward way to fix this issue

A communication protocol for interactively controlling software tools

We present a protocol for interactively using software tools in a loosely coupled tool environment. Such an environment can assist the user in doing tasks that require the use of multiple tools. For example, it can invoke tools on certain input, set processing parameters, await task completion and have tools communicate the resulting output. It can also keep track of files produced by tools and prevent tools from reading and writing to the same file at the same time. The protocol serves as an interface between the tools and a central tool manager. Generally, the manager controls the tools and forms an interface to a human user. The protocol is used to connect our tool manager SQuADT to a variety of tools, hereby allowing these tools to be used on all major software platforms

Static Race Detection and Mutex Safety and Liveness for Go Programs

Go is a popular concurrent programming language thanks to its ability to efficiently combine concurrency and systems programming. In Go programs, a number of concurrency bugs can be caused by a mixture of data races and communication problems. In this paper, we develop a theory based on behavioural types to statically detect data races and deadlocks in Go programs. We first specify lock safety/liveness and data race properties over a Go program model, using the happens-before relation defined in the Go memory model. We represent these properties of programs in a μ-calculus model of types, and validate them using type-level model-checking. We then extend the framework to account for Go’s channels, and implement a static verification tool which can detect concurrency errors. This is, to the best of our knowledge, the first static verification framework of this kind for the Go language, uniformly analysing concurrency errors caused by a mix of shared memory accesses and asynchronous message-passing communications

Problem Solving Using Process Algebra Considered Insightful

Process algebras with data, such as LOTOS, PSF, FDR, and mCRL2, are very suitable to model and analyse combinatorial problems. Contrary to more traditional mathematics, many of these problems can very directly be formulated in process algebra. Using a wide range of techniques, such as behavioural reductions, model checking, and visualisation, the problems can subsequently be easily solved. With the advent of probabilistic process algebras this also extends to problems where probabilities play a role. In this paper we model and analyse a number of very well-known – yet tricky – problems and show the elegance of behavioural analysis