581 research outputs found
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
Trusting Computations: a Mechanized Proof from Partial Differential Equations to Actual Program
Computer programs may go wrong due to exceptional behaviors, out-of-bound
array accesses, or simply coding errors. Thus, they cannot be blindly trusted.
Scientific computing programs make no exception in that respect, and even bring
specific accuracy issues due to their massive use of floating-point
computations. Yet, it is uncommon to guarantee their correctness. Indeed, we
had to extend existing methods and tools for proving the correct behavior of
programs to verify an existing numerical analysis program. This C program
implements the second-order centered finite difference explicit scheme for
solving the 1D wave equation. In fact, we have gone much further as we have
mechanically verified the convergence of the numerical scheme in order to get a
complete formal proof covering all aspects from partial differential equations
to actual numerical results. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first
time such a comprehensive proof is achieved.Comment: N° RR-8197 (2012). arXiv admin note: text overlap with
arXiv:1112.179
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