4,439 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
BigraphER: rewriting and analysis engine for bigraphs
BigraphER is a suite of open-source tools providing an effi-
cient implementation of rewriting, simulation, and visualisation for bigraphs,
a universal formalism for modelling interacting systems that
evolve in time and space and first introduced by Milner. BigraphER consists
of an OCaml library that provides programming interfaces for the
manipulation of bigraphs, their constituents and reaction rules, and a
command-line tool capable of simulating Bigraphical Reactive Systems
(BRSs) and computing their transition systems. Other features are native
support for both bigraphs and bigraphs with sharing, stochastic reaction
rules, rule priorities, instantiation maps, parameterised controls, predicate
checking, graphical output and integration with the probabilistic
model checker PRISM
On Expressing and Monitoring Oscillatory Dynamics
To express temporal properties of dense-time real-valued signals, the Signal
Temporal Logic (STL) has been defined by Maler et al. The work presented a
monitoring algorithm deciding the satisfiability of STL formulae on finite
discrete samples of continuous signals. The logic has been used to express and
analyse biological systems, but it is not expressive enough to sufficiently
distinguish oscillatory properties important in biology. In this paper we
define the extended logic STL* in which STL is augmented with a signal-value
freezing operator allowing us to express (and distinguish) detailed properties
of biological oscillations. The logic is supported by a monitoring algorithm
prototyped in Matlab. The monitoring procedure of STL* is evaluated on a
biologically-relevant case study.Comment: In Proceedings HSB 2012, arXiv:1208.315
Model Checking Social Network Models
A social network service is a platform to build social relations among people
sharing similar interests and activities. The underlying structure of a social
networks service is the social graph, where nodes represent users and the arcs
represent the users' social links and other kind of connections. One important
concern in social networks is privacy: what others are (not) allowed to know
about us. The "logic of knowledge" (epistemic logic) is thus a good formalism
to define, and reason about, privacy policies. In this paper we consider the
problem of verifying knowledge properties over social network models (SNMs),
that is social graphs enriched with knowledge bases containing the information
that the users know. More concretely, our contributions are: i) We prove that
the model checking problem for epistemic properties over SNMs is decidable; ii)
We prove that a number of properties of knowledge that are sound w.r.t. Kripke
models are also sound w.r.t. SNMs; iii) We give a satisfaction-preserving
encoding of SNMs into canonical Kripke models, and we also characterise which
Kripke models may be translated into SNMs; iv) We show that, for SNMs, the
model checking problem is cheaper than the one based on standard Kripke models.
Finally, we have developed a proof-of-concept implementation of the
model-checking algorithm for SNMs.Comment: In Proceedings GandALF 2017, arXiv:1709.0176
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