7,735 research outputs found
Set Partition and Trace Based Verification of Web Service Composition
AbstractDe*signing and running Web services compositions are error-prone as it is difficult to determine the behavior of web services during execution and their conformance to functional requirements. Interaction among composite Web services may cause concurrency related issues. In this paper, we present a formal model for reasoning and verifying Web services composition at design level. We partition the candidate services being considered for composition into several subsets on the basis of their service invocation order. We arrange these subsets to form a Web services set partition graph and transform to a set of interacting traces. Then, we propose a novel methodology for service interaction verification that uses service description (from WSDL file) to extract the necessary information and facilitates the process of modeling, analyzing, and reasoning the composite services. As a part of verification technique, we use two levels of modeling. This includes abstract modeling that further leads to detailed modeling if required, thereby reducing the computation time and modeling complexity
Using schedulers to test probabilistic distributed systems
This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00165-012-0244-5. Copyright Ā© 2012, British Computer Society.Formal methods are one of the most important approaches to increasing the confidence in the correctness of software systems. A formal specification can be used as an oracle in testing since one can determine whether an observed behaviour is allowed by the specification. This is an important feature of formal testing: behaviours of the system observed in testing are compared with the specification and ideally this comparison is automated. In this paper we study a formal testing framework to deal with systems that interact with their environment at physically distributed interfaces, called ports, and where choices between different possibilities are probabilistically quantified. Building on previous work, we introduce two families of schedulers to resolve nondeterministic choices among different actions of the system. The first type of schedulers, which we call global schedulers, resolves nondeterministic choices by representing the environment as a single global scheduler. The second type, which we call localised schedulers, models the environment as a set of schedulers with there being one scheduler for each port. We formally define the application of schedulers to systems and provide and study different implementation relations in this setting
Possibilistic Information Flow Control for Workflow Management Systems
In workflows and business processes, there are often security requirements on
both the data, i.e. confidentiality and integrity, and the process, e.g.
separation of duty. Graphical notations exist for specifying both workflows and
associated security requirements. We present an approach for formally verifying
that a workflow satisfies such security requirements. For this purpose, we
define the semantics of a workflow as a state-event system and formalise
security properties in a trace-based way, i.e. on an abstract level without
depending on details of enforcement mechanisms such as Role-Based Access
Control (RBAC). This formal model then allows us to build upon well-known
verification techniques for information flow control. We describe how a
compositional verification methodology for possibilistic information flow can
be adapted to verify that a specification of a distributed workflow management
system satisfies security requirements on both data and processes.Comment: In Proceedings GraMSec 2014, arXiv:1404.163
Distributed System Contract Monitoring
The use of behavioural contracts, to specify, regulate and verify systems, is
particularly relevant to runtime monitoring of distributed systems. System
distribution poses major challenges to contract monitoring, from
monitoring-induced information leaks to computation load balancing,
communication overheads and fault-tolerance. We present mDPi, a location-aware
process calculus, for reasoning about monitoring of distributed systems. We
define a family of Labelled Transition Systems for this calculus, which allow
formal reasoning about different monitoring strategies at different levels of
abstractions. We also illustrate the expressivity of the calculus by showing
how contracts in a simple contract language can be synthesised into different
mDPi monitors.Comment: In Proceedings FLACOS 2011, arXiv:1109.239
Formal aspects of component software
This is the pre-proceedings of 6th International Workshop on Formal Aspects of Component Software (FACS'09)
Coordination via Interaction Constraints I: Local Logic
Wegner describes coordination as constrained interaction. We take this
approach literally and define a coordination model based on interaction
constraints and partial, iterative and interactive constraint satisfaction. Our
model captures behaviour described in terms of synchronisation and data flow
constraints, plus various modes of interaction with the outside world provided
by external constraint symbols, on-the-fly constraint generation, and
coordination variables. Underlying our approach is an engine performing
(partial) constraint satisfaction of the sets of constraints. Our model extends
previous work on three counts: firstly, a more advanced notion of external
interaction is offered; secondly, our approach enables local satisfaction of
constraints with appropriate partial solutions, avoiding global synchronisation
over the entire constraints set; and, as a consequence, constraint satisfaction
can finally occur concurrently, and multiple parts of a set of constraints can
be solved and interact with the outside world in an asynchronous manner, unless
synchronisation is required by the constraints. This paper describes the
underlying logic, which enables a notion of local solution, and relates this
logic to the more global approach of our previous work based on classical
logic
On the Behaviour of General-Purpose Applications on Cloud Storages
Managing data over cloud infrastructures raises novel challenges with respect to existing and well studied approaches such as ACID and long running transactions. One of the main requirements is to provide availability and partition tolerance in a scenario with replicas and distributed control. This comes at the price of a weaker consistency, usually called eventual consistency. These weak memory models have proved to be suitable in a number of scenarios, such as the analysis of large data with Map-Reduce. However, due to the widespread availability of cloud infrastructures, weak storages are used not only by specialised applications but also by general purpose applications. We provide a formal approach, based on process calculi, to reason about the behaviour of programs that rely on cloud stores. For instance, one can check that the composition of a process with a cloud store ensures `strong' properties through a wise usage of asynchronous message-passing
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