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

Comparing BDD and SAT based techniques for model checking Chaum's Dining Cryptographers Protocol

We analyse different versions of the Dining Cryptographers protocol by means of automatic verification via model checking. Specifically we model the protocol in terms of a network of communicating automata and verify that the protocol meets the anonymity requirements specified. Two different model checking techniques (ordered binary decision diagrams and SAT-based bounded model checking) are evaluated and compared to verify the protocols

Model checking quantum Markov chains

Although the security of quantum cryptography is provable based on the principles of quantum mechanics, it can be compromised by the flaws in the design of quantum protocols and the noise in their physical implementations. So, it is indispensable to develop techniques of verifying and debugging quantum cryptographic systems. Model-checking has proved to be effective in the verification of classical cryptographic protocols, but an essential difficulty arises when it is applied to quantum systems: the state space of a quantum system is always a continuum even when its dimension is finite. To overcome this difficulty, we introduce a novel notion of quantum Markov chain, specially suited to model quantum cryptographic protocols, in which quantum effects are entirely encoded into super-operators labelling transitions, leaving the location information (nodes) being classical. Then we define a quantum extension of probabilistic computation tree logic (PCTL) and develop a model-checking algorithm for quantum Markov chains.Comment: Journal versio

A Dual-Engine for Early Analysis of Critical Systems

This paper presents a framework for modeling, simulating, and checking properties of critical systems based on the Alloy language -- a declarative, first-order, relational logic with a built-in transitive closure operator. The paper introduces a new dual-analysis engine that is capable of providing both counterexamples and proofs. Counterexamples are found fully automatically using an SMT solver, which provides a better support for numerical expressions than the existing Alloy Analyzer. Proofs, however, cannot always be found automatically since the Alloy language is undecidable. Our engine offers an economical approach by first trying to prove properties using a fully-automatic, SMT-based analysis, and switches to an interactive theorem prover only if the first attempt fails. This paper also reports on applying our framework to Microsoft's COM standard and the mark-and-sweep garbage collection algorithm.Comment: Workshop on Dependable Software for Critical Infrastructures (DSCI), Berlin 201

Abstract Model Counting: A Novel Approach for Quantification of Information Leaks

acmid: 2590328 keywords: model checking, quantitative information flow, satisfiability modulo theories, symbolic execution location: Kyoto, Japan numpages: 10acmid: 2590328 keywords: model checking, quantitative information flow, satisfiability modulo theories, symbolic execution location: Kyoto, Japan numpages: 10acmid: 2590328 keywords: model checking, quantitative information flow, satisfiability modulo theories, symbolic execution location: Kyoto, Japan numpages: 10We present a novel method for Quantitative Information Flow analysis. We show how the problem of computing information leakage can be viewed as an extension of the Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) problem. This view enables us to develop a framework for QIF analysis based on the framework DPLL(T) used in SMT solvers. We then show that the methodology of Symbolic Execution (SE) also fits our framework. Based on these ideas, we build two QIF analysis tools: the first one employs CBMC, a bounded model checker for ANSI C, and the second one is built on top of Symbolic PathFinder, a Symbolic Executor for Java. We use these tools to quantify leaks in industrial code such as C programs from the Linux kernel, a Java tax program from the European project HATS, and anonymity protocol

Diagnose network failures via data-plane analysis

Diagnosing problems in networks is a time-consuming and error-prone process. Previous tools to assist operators primarily focus on analyzing control plane configuration. Configuration analysis is limited in that it cannot find bugs in router software, and is harder to generalize across protocols since it must model complex configuration languages and dynamic protocol behavior. This paper studies an alternate approach: diagnosing problems through static analysis of the data plane. This approach can catch bugs that are invisible at the level of configuration files, and simplifies unified analysis of a network across many protocols and implementations. We present Anteater, a tool for checking invariants in the data plane. Anteater translates high-level network invariants into boolean satisfiability problems, checks them against network state using a SAT solver, and reports counterexamples if violations have been found. Applied to a large campus network, Anteater revealed 23 bugs, including forwarding loops and stale ACL rules, with only five false positives. Nine of these faults are being fixed by campus network operators

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