IEEE/NASA Workshop on Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification, and Validation

This volume contains the Preliminary Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE ISoLA Workshop on Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification, and Validation, with a special track on the theme of Formal Methods in Human and Robotic Space Exploration. The workshop was held on 23-24 September 2005 at the Loyola College Graduate Center, Columbia, MD, USA. The idea behind the Workshop arose from the experience and feedback of ISoLA 2004, the 1st International Symposium on Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods held in Paphos (Cyprus) last October-November. ISoLA 2004 served the need of providing a forum for developers, users, and researchers to discuss issues related to the adoption and use of rigorous tools and methods for the specification, analysis, verification, certification, construction, test, and maintenance of systems from the point of view of their different application domains

Analyzing the Interoperability of WS-Security and WS-ReliableMessaging Implementations

Since their invention as lightweight integration technology about a decade ago, Web Services have matured significantly. Today, major middleware solution vendors as well as industry communities like RosettaNet are propagating Web services even for exchanging business-critical data and implementing inter-organizational business processes. Core enablers for using Web services in this domain are stateful interactions using the Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) as well as advanced communication features like security and reliability using the WS-Security and WS-ReliableMessaging standard specifications. However, advanced communication features come at the price of complexity which challenges interoperability across different Web services stack implementations. Interoperability, in turn, is a predominant requirement for an integration technology such as Web services, in particular if inter-organizational business processes are supposed to be implemented on top of that technology. This paper approaches the problem of testing the interoperability of the so-called WS-* standards, advanced Web services communication features that are typically defined as SOAP extensions and configured using WS-Policy. Being essential to business process integration, WS-Security and WS-ReliableMessaging are selected as representatives of this group and the two major Java-based Web services stack implementations Metro and Axis2 are tested for interoperability. We operationalize the notion of interoperability for testing WS-* standards, suppose an approach for deriving test cases from WS-* specifications as well as a method for performing the test cases, and we provide a comprehensive interoperability review of the two selected Web services stack implementations

SymbexNet: Checking Network Protocol Implementations using Symbolic Execution

The implementations of network protocols, such as DNS, DHCP and Zeroconf, are prone to flaws, security vulnerabilities and interoperability issues caused by ambiguous requirements in protocol specifications. Detecting such problems is not easy because (i) many bugs manifest themselves only after prolonged operation; (ii) the state space of complex protocol implementations is large; and (iii) problems often require additional information about correct behaviour from specifications. This thesis presents a novel approach to detect various types of flaws in network protocol implementations by combining symbolic execution and rule-based packet matching. The core idea behind our approach is to generate automatically high-coverage test input packets for a network protocol implementation. For this, the protocol implementation is run using a symbolic execution engine to obtain test input packets. These packets are then used to detect potential violations of rules that constrain permitted input and output packets and were derived from the protocol specification. We propose a technique that repeatedly performs symbolic execution on selected test input packets to achieve broad and deep exploration of the implementation state space. In addition, we use the generated test packets to check interoperability between different implementations of the same network protocol. We present a system based on these techniques, SYMBEXNET, and show that it can automatically generate test input packets that achieve high source code coverage and discover various bugs. We evaluate SYMBEXNET on multiple implementations of two network protocols: Zeroconf, a service discovery protocol, and DHCP, a network configuration protocol. SYMBEXNET is able to discover non-trivial bugs as well as interoperability problems, most of which have been confirmed by the developers

Formalizing Interoperability for Test Case Generation Purpose

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