4,172 research outputs found
Research in mathematical theory of computation
Research progress in the following areas is reviewed: (1) new version of computer program LCF (logic for computable functions) including a facility to search for proofs automatically; (2) the description of the language PASCAL in terms of both LCF and in first order logic; (3) discussion of LISP semantics in LCF and attempt to prove the correctness of the London compilers in a formal way; (4) design of both special purpose and domain independent proving procedures specifically program correctness in mind; (5) design of languages for describing such proof procedures; and (6) the embedding of ideas in the first order checker
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
On the engineering of crucial software
The various aspects of the conventional software development cycle are examined. This cycle was the basis of the augmented approach contained in the original grant proposal. This cycle was found inadequate for crucial software development, and the justification for this opinion is presented. Several possible enhancements to the conventional software cycle are discussed. Software fault tolerance, a possible enhancement of major importance, is discussed separately. Formal verification using mathematical proof is considered. Automatic programming is a radical alternative to the conventional cycle and is discussed. Recommendations for a comprehensive approach are presented, and various experiments which could be conducted in AIRLAB are described
A strategy for automatically generating programs in the lucid programming language
A strategy for automatically generating and verifying simple computer programs is described. The programs are specified by a precondition and a postcondition in predicate calculus. The programs generated are in the Lucid programming language, a high-level, data-flow language known for its attractive mathematical properties and ease of program verification. The Lucid programming is described, and the automatic program generation strategy is described and applied to several example problems
Formalizing structured file services for the data storage and retrieval subsystem of the data management system for Spacestation Freedom
A brief example of the use of formal methods techniques in the specification of a software system is presented. The report is part of a larger effort targeted at defining a formal methods pilot project for NASA. One possible application domain that may be used to demonstrate the effective use of formal methods techniques within the NASA environment is presented. It is not intended to provide a tutorial on either formal methods techniques or the application being addressed. It should, however, provide an indication that the application being considered is suitable for a formal methods by showing how such a task may be started. The particular system being addressed is the Structured File Services (SFS), which is a part of the Data Storage and Retrieval Subsystem (DSAR), which in turn is part of the Data Management System (DMS) onboard Spacestation Freedom. This is a software system that is currently under development for NASA. An informal mathematical development is presented. Section 3 contains the same development using Penelope (23), an Ada specification and verification system. The complete text of the English version Software Requirements Specification (SRS) is reproduced in Appendix A
Impossibility of Gathering, a Certification
Recent advances in Distributed Computing highlight models and algorithms for
autonomous swarms of mobile robots that self-organise and cooperate to solve
global objectives. The overwhelming majority of works so far considers handmade
algorithms and proofs of correctness. This paper builds upon a previously
proposed formal framework to certify the correctness of impossibility results
regarding distributed algorithms that are dedicated to autonomous mobile robots
evolving in a continuous space. As a case study, we consider the problem of
gathering all robots at a particular location, not known beforehand. A
fundamental (but not yet formally certified) result, due to Suzuki and
Yamashita, states that this simple task is impossible for two robots executing
deterministic code and initially located at distinct positions. Not only do we
obtain a certified proof of the original impossibility result, we also get the
more general impossibility of gathering with an even number of robots, when any
two robots are possibly initially at the same exact location.Comment: 10
Logical Concurrency Control from Sequential Proofs
We are interested in identifying and enforcing the isolation requirements of
a concurrent program, i.e., concurrency control that ensures that the program
meets its specification. The thesis of this paper is that this can be done
systematically starting from a sequential proof, i.e., a proof of correctness
of the program in the absence of concurrent interleavings. We illustrate our
thesis by presenting a solution to the problem of making a sequential library
thread-safe for concurrent clients. We consider a sequential library annotated
with assertions along with a proof that these assertions hold in a sequential
execution. We show how we can use the proof to derive concurrency control that
ensures that any execution of the library methods, when invoked by concurrent
clients, satisfies the same assertions. We also present an extension to
guarantee that the library methods are linearizable or atomic
Synthesizing Certified Code
Code certification is a lightweight approach for formally demonstrating software quality. Its basic idea is to require code producers to provide formal proofs that their code satisfies certain quality properties. These proofs serve as certificates that can be checked independently. Since code certification uses the same underlying technology as program verification, it requires detailed annotations (e.g., loop invariants) to make the proofs possible. However, manually adding annotations to the code is time-consuming and error-prone. We address this problem by combining code certification with automatic program synthesis. Given a high-level specification, our approach simultaneously generates code and all annotations required to certify the generated code. We describe a certification extension of AutoBayes, a synthesis tool for automatically generating data analysis programs. Based on built-in domain knowledge, proof annotations are added and used to generate proof obligations that are discharged by the automated theorem prover E-SETHEO. We demonstrate our approach by certifying operator- and memory-safety on a data-classification program. For this program, our approach was faster and more precise than PolySpace, a commercial static analysis tool
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