24,696 research outputs found
Abstraction and Learning for Infinite-State Compositional Verification
Despite many advances that enable the application of model checking
techniques to the verification of large systems, the state-explosion problem
remains the main challenge for scalability. Compositional verification
addresses this challenge by decomposing the verification of a large system into
the verification of its components. Recent techniques use learning-based
approaches to automate compositional verification based on the assume-guarantee
style reasoning. However, these techniques are only applicable to finite-state
systems. In this work, we propose a new framework that interleaves abstraction
and learning to perform automated compositional verification of infinite-state
systems. We also discuss the role of learning and abstraction in the related
context of interface generation for infinite-state components.Comment: In Proceedings Festschrift for Dave Schmidt, arXiv:1309.455
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
User-friendly Support for Common Concepts in a Lightweight Verifier
Machine verification of formal arguments can only increase our confidence in the correctness of those arguments, but the costs of employing machine verification still outweigh the benefits for some common kinds of formal reasoning activities. As a result, usability is becoming increasingly important in the design of formal verification tools. We describe the "aartifact" lightweight verification system, designed for processing formal arguments involving basic, ubiquitous mathematical concepts. The system is a prototype for investigating potential techniques for improving the usability of formal verification systems. It leverages techniques drawn both from existing work and from our own efforts. In addition to a parser for a familiar concrete syntax and a mechanism for automated syntax lookup, the system integrates (1) a basic logical inference algorithm, (2) a database of propositions governing common mathematical concepts, and (3) a data structure that computes congruence closures of expressions involving relations found in this database. Together, these components allow the system to better accommodate the expectations of users interested in verifying formal arguments involving algebraic and logical manipulations of numbers, sets, vectors, and related operators and predicates. We demonstrate the reasonable performance of this system on typical formal arguments and briefly discuss how the system's design contributed to its usability in two case studies
Fifty years of Hoare's Logic
We present a history of Hoare's logic.Comment: 79 pages. To appear in Formal Aspects of Computin
Verifying Safety Properties With the TLA+ Proof System
TLAPS, the TLA+ proof system, is a platform for the development and
mechanical verification of TLA+ proofs written in a declarative style requiring
little background beyond elementary mathematics. The language supports
hierarchical and non-linear proof construction and verification, and it is
independent of any verification tool or strategy. A Proof Manager uses backend
verifiers such as theorem provers, proof assistants, SMT solvers, and decision
procedures to check TLA+ proofs. This paper documents the first public release
of TLAPS, distributed with a BSD-like license. It handles almost all the
non-temporal part of TLA+ as well as the temporal reasoning needed to prove
standard safety properties, in particular invariance and step simulation, but
not liveness properties
Computer-aided verification in mechanism design
In mechanism design, the gold standard solution concepts are dominant
strategy incentive compatibility and Bayesian incentive compatibility. These
solution concepts relieve the (possibly unsophisticated) bidders from the need
to engage in complicated strategizing. While incentive properties are simple to
state, their proofs are specific to the mechanism and can be quite complex.
This raises two concerns. From a practical perspective, checking a complex
proof can be a tedious process, often requiring experts knowledgeable in
mechanism design. Furthermore, from a modeling perspective, if unsophisticated
agents are unconvinced of incentive properties, they may strategize in
unpredictable ways.
To address both concerns, we explore techniques from computer-aided
verification to construct formal proofs of incentive properties. Because formal
proofs can be automatically checked, agents do not need to manually check the
properties, or even understand the proof. To demonstrate, we present the
verification of a sophisticated mechanism: the generic reduction from Bayesian
incentive compatible mechanism design to algorithm design given by Hartline,
Kleinberg, and Malekian. This mechanism presents new challenges for formal
verification, including essential use of randomness from both the execution of
the mechanism and from the prior type distributions. As an immediate
consequence, our work also formalizes Bayesian incentive compatibility for the
entire family of mechanisms derived via this reduction. Finally, as an
intermediate step in our formalization, we provide the first formal
verification of incentive compatibility for the celebrated
Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism
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