Quantitative Verification: Formal Guarantees for Timeliness, Reliability and Performance

Computerised systems appear in almost all aspects of our daily lives, often in safety-critical scenarios such as embedded control systems in cars and aircraft or medical devices such as pacemakers and sensors. We are thus increasingly reliant on these systems working correctly, despite often operating in unpredictable or unreliable environments. Designers of such devices need ways to guarantee that they will operate in a reliable and efficient manner. Quantitative verification is a technique for analysing quantitative aspects of a system's design, such as timeliness, reliability or performance. It applies formal methods, based on a rigorous analysis of a mathematical model of the system, to automatically prove certain precisely specified properties, e.g. ``the airbag will always deploy within 20 milliseconds after a crash'' or ``the probability of both sensors failing simultaneously is less than 0.001''. The ability to formally guarantee quantitative properties of this kind is beneficial across a wide range of application domains. For example, in safety-critical systems, it may be essential to establish credible bounds on the probability with which certain failures or combinations of failures can occur. In embedded control systems, it is often important to comply with strict constraints on timing or resources. More generally, being able to derive guarantees on precisely specified levels of performance or efficiency is a valuable tool in the design of, for example, wireless networking protocols, robotic systems or power management algorithms, to name but a few. This report gives a short introduction to quantitative verification, focusing in particular on a widely used technique called model checking, and its generalisation to the analysis of quantitative aspects of a system such as timing, probabilistic behaviour or resource usage. The intended audience is industrial designers and developers of systems such as those highlighted above who could benefit from the application of quantitative verification,but lack expertise in formal verification or modelling

Applied Formal Methods in Wireless Sensor Networks

This work covers the application of formal methods to the world of wireless sensor networks. Mainly two different perspectives are analyzed through mathematical models which can be distinct for example into qualitative statements like "Is the system error free?" From the perspective of quantitative propositions we investigate protocol optimal parameter settings for an energy efficient operation

A Survey on IT-Techniques for a Dynamic Emergency Management in Large Infrastructures

This deliverable is a survey on the IT techniques that are relevant to the three use cases of the project EMILI. It describes the state-of-the-art in four complementary IT areas: Data cleansing, supervisory control and data acquisition, wireless sensor networks and complex event processing. Even though the deliverable’s authors have tried to avoid a too technical language and have tried to explain every concept referred to, the deliverable might seem rather technical to readers so far little familiar with the techniques it describes

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

Aspects of Modeling and Verifying Secure Procedures

Security protocols are specifications for exchanging messages on a possibly insecure network. They aim at achieving some security goals (eg authenticating the parties involved in a communication, or preserving confidentiality of certain messages) preventing some malicious party to achieve advantages for its own. Goals of security protocols are generally achieved through the use of cryptography, the art of writing in secret characters, not comprehensible to anyone but the sender and the intended recipient. There is however a branch, in the computer science community, that, among its wide field of activities, aims at studying possible attacks on secure procedures without breaking cryptography, eg by manipulating some of the exchanged messages. This is the formal methods community, with an eye for security. This thesis mainly investigates the formal modeling and analysis of security protocols, both with finite and non finite behaviour, both within a process-algebraic and an automata framework. Real life protocols for signing and protecting digital contents and for giving assurance about authentic correspondences will be specified by means of the above cited formalisms, and some of their properties will be verified by means of formal proofs and automated tools. The original contributions of this thesis are the following. Within the framework of a formal modeling and verification of security protocols, we have applied an automated tool to better understand some secure mechanisms for the delivery of electronic documents. This has given us a deep insight on revealing the effects of omitted (or even erroneously implemented) security checks. Furthermore, a formal framework for modeling and analysing secure multicast and wireless communication protocols has been proposed. The analysis is mostly based on some new compositional principles giving sufficient conditions for safely composing an arbitrary number of components within a unique system. Also, steps towards providing the Team Automata formalism (TA) with a framework for security analysis have been taken. Within the framework, we model and analyse integrity and privacy properties, contributing to testify the expressive power and modelling capabilities of TA

Formal models and analysis of secure multicast in wired and wireless networks

The spreading of multicast technology enables the development of group communication and so dealing with digital streams becomes more and more common over the Internet. Given the flourishing of security threats, the distribution of streamed data must be equipped with sufficient security guarantees. To this aim, some architectures have been proposed, to supply the distribution of the stream with guarantees of, e.g., authenticity, integrity, and confidentiality of the digital contents. This paper shows a formal capability of capturing some features of secure multicast protocols. In particular, both the modeling and the analysis of some case studies are shown, starting from basic schemes for signing digital streams, passing through proto- cols dealing with packet loss and time-synchronization requirements, concluding with a secure distribution of a secret key. A process-algebraic framework will be exploited, equipped with schemata for analysing security properties and compositional principles for evaluating if a property is satisfied over a system with more than two components

Safe and Secure Support for Public Safety Networks

International audienceAs explained by Tanzi et al. in the first volume of this book, communicating and autonomous devices will surely have a role to play in the future Public Safety Networks. The “communicating” feature comes from the fact that the information should be delivered in a fast way to rescuers. The “autonomous” characteristic comes from the fact that rescuers should not have to concern themselves about these objects: they should perform their mission autonomously so as not to delay the intervention of the rescuers, but rather to assist them efficiently and reliably.</p

Prospectiva de seguridad de las redes de sensores inalámbricos

En las Redes de Sensores Inalámbricos (WSN), los nodos son vulnerables a los ataques de seguridad porque están instalados en un entorno difícil, con energía y memoria limitadas, baja capacidad de procesamiento y transmisión de difusión media; por lo tanto, identificar las amenazas, los retos y las soluciones de seguridad y privacidad es un tema candente hoy en día. En este artículo se analizan los trabajos de investigación que se han realizado sobre los mecanismos de seguridad para la protección de las WSN frente a amenazas y ataques, así como las tendencias que surgen en otros países junto con futuras líneas de investigación. Desde el punto de vista metodológico, este análisis se muestra a través de la visualización y estudio de trabajos indexados en bases de datos como IEEE, ACM, Scopus y Springer, con un rango de 7 años como ventana de observación, desde 2013 hasta 2019. Se obtuvieron un total de 4.728 publicaciones, con un alto índice de colaboración entre China e India. La investigación planteó desarrollos, como avances en los principios de seguridad y mecanismos de defensa, que han llevado al diseño de contramedidas en la detección de intrusiones. Por último, los resultados muestran el interés de la comunidad científica y empresarial por el uso de la inteligencia artificial y el aprendizaje automático (ML) para optimizar las medidas de rendimiento.In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), nodes are vulnerable to security attacks because they are installed in a harsh environment with limited power and memory, low processing power, and medium broadcast transmission. Therefore, identifying threats, challenges, and solutions of security and privacy is a talking topic today. This article analyzes the research work that has been carried out on the security mechanisms for the protection of WSN against threats and attacks, as well as the trends that emerge in other countries combined with future research lines. From the methodological point of view, this analysis is shown through the visualization and study of works indexed in databases such as IEEE, ACM, Scopus, and Springer, with a range of 7 years as an observation window, from 2013 to 2019. A total of 4,728 publications were obtained, with a high rate of collaboration between China and India. The research raised developments, such as advances in security principles and defense mechanisms, which have led to the design of countermeasures in intrusion detection. Finally, the results show the interest of the scientific and business community in the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) to optimize performance measurements