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

Towards Verifying Declarative Netlog Protocols with Coq

Declarative languages, such as recursive rule based languages, have been proposed to program distributed applications over networks.It has been shown that they simplify greatly the code, while still offering efficient distributed execution. In this paper, we show that moreover they provide a promising approach to the verification of distributed protocols. We choose the Netlog language and use the Coq proof assistant. We first formalize the distributed computation model based on message passing with either synchronous or asynchronous behavior. We then see how the declarative rules of the protocols can be simply encoded in Coq. Finally, we develop the machine embedded on each node of the network which evaluates the rules. This framework enables us to formally verify distributed declarative protocols, as sketched on a concrete example, a breadth-first search tree construction in a distributed network

Applying Prolog to Develop Distributed Systems

Development of distributed systems is a difficult task. Declarative programming techniques hold a promising potential for effectively supporting programmer in this challenge. While Datalog-based languages have been actively explored for programming distributed systems, Prolog received relatively little attention in this application area so far. In this paper we present a Prolog-based programming system, called DAHL, for the declarative development of distributed systems. DAHL extends Prolog with an event-driven control mechanism and built-in networking procedures. Our experimental evaluation using a distributed hash-table data structure, a protocol for achieving Byzantine fault tolerance, and a distributed software model checker - all implemented in DAHL - indicates the viability of the approach

Towards Secure Cloud Data Management

This paper explores the security challenges posed by data-intensive applications deployed in cloud environments that span administrative and network domains. We propose a data-centric view of cloud security and discuss data management challenges in the areas of secure distributed data processing, end-to-end query result verification, and cross-user trust policy management. In addition, we describe our current and future efforts to investigate security challenges in cloud data management using the Declarative Secure Distributed Systems (DS2) platform, a declarative infrastructure for specifying, analyzing, and deploying secure information systems

Towards an Intelligent Tutor for Mathematical Proofs

Computer-supported learning is an increasingly important form of study since it allows for independent learning and individualized instruction. In this paper, we discuss a novel approach to developing an intelligent tutoring system for teaching textbook-style mathematical proofs. We characterize the particularities of the domain and discuss common ITS design models. Our approach is motivated by phenomena found in a corpus of tutorial dialogs that were collected in a Wizard-of-Oz experiment. We show how an intelligent tutor for textbook-style mathematical proofs can be built on top of an adapted assertion-level proof assistant by reusing representations and proof search strategies originally developed for automated and interactive theorem proving. The resulting prototype was successfully evaluated on a corpus of tutorial dialogs and yields good results.Comment: In Proceedings THedu'11, arXiv:1202.453