1,433 research outputs found
Formal Methods Specification and Analysis Guidebook for the Verification of Software and Computer Systems
This guidebook, the second of a two-volume series, is intended to facilitate the transfer of formal methods to the avionics and aerospace community. The 1st volume concentrates on administrative and planning issues [NASA-95a], and the second volume focuses on the technical issues involved in applying formal methods to avionics and aerospace software systems. Hereafter, the term "guidebook" refers exclusively to the second volume of the series. The title of this second volume, A Practitioner's Companion, conveys its intent. The guidebook is written primarily for the nonexpert and requires little or no prior experience with formal methods techniques and tools. However, it does attempt to distill some of the more subtle ingredients in the productive application of formal methods. To the extent that it succeeds, those conversant with formal methods will also nd the guidebook useful. The discussion is illustrated through the development of a realistic example, relevant fragments of which appear in each chapter. The guidebook focuses primarily on the use of formal methods for analysis of requirements and high-level design, the stages at which formal methods have been most productively applied. Although much of the discussion applies to low-level design and implementation, the guidebook does not discuss issues involved in the later life cycle application of formal methods
Knowledge Flow Analysis for Security Protocols
Knowledge flow analysis offers a simple and flexible way to find flaws in
security protocols. A protocol is described by a collection of rules
constraining the propagation of knowledge amongst principals. Because this
characterization corresponds closely to informal descriptions of protocols, it
allows a succinct and natural formalization; because it abstracts away message
ordering, and handles communications between principals and applications of
cryptographic primitives uniformly, it is readily represented in a standard
logic. A generic framework in the Alloy modelling language is presented, and
instantiated for two standard protocols, and a new key management scheme.Comment: 20 page
Scaling Up Automated Verification: A Case Study and a Formalization IDE for Building High Integrity Software
Component-based software verification is a difficult challenge because developers must specify components formally and annotate implementations with suitable assertions that are amenable to automation. This research investigates the intrinsic complexity in this challenge using a component-based case study. Simultaneously, this work also seeks to minimize the extrinsic complexities of this challenge through the development and usage of a formalization integrated development environment (F-IDE) built for specifying, developing, and using verified reusable software components.
The first contribution is an F-IDE built to support formal specification and automated verification of object-based software for the integrated specification and programming language RESOLVE. The F-IDE is novel, as it integrates a verifying compiler with a user-friendly interface that provides a number of amenities including responsive editing for model-based mathematical contracts and code, assistance for design by contract, verification, responsive error handling, and generation of property-preserving Java code that can be run within the F-IDE.
The second contribution is a case study built using the F-IDE that involves an interplay of multiple artifacts encompassing mathematical units, component interfaces, and realizations. The object-based interfaces involved are specified in terms of new mathematical models and non-trivial theories designed to encapsulate data structures and algorithms. The components are designed to be amenable to modular verification and analysis
The use of data-mining for the automatic formation of tactics
This paper discusses the usse of data-mining for the automatic formation of tactics. It was presented at the Workshop on Computer-Supported Mathematical Theory Development held at IJCAR in 2004. The aim of this project is to evaluate the applicability of data-mining techniques to the automatic formation of tactics from large corpuses of proofs. We data-mine information from large proof corpuses to find commonly occurring patterns. These patterns are then evolved into tactics using genetic programming techniques
Towards an Intelligent Tutor for Mathematical Proofs
Computer-supported learning is an increasingly important form of study since
it allows for independent learning and individualized instruction. In this
paper, we discuss a novel approach to developing an intelligent tutoring system
for teaching textbook-style mathematical proofs. We characterize the
particularities of the domain and discuss common ITS design models. Our
approach is motivated by phenomena found in a corpus of tutorial dialogs that
were collected in a Wizard-of-Oz experiment. We show how an intelligent tutor
for textbook-style mathematical proofs can be built on top of an adapted
assertion-level proof assistant by reusing representations and proof search
strategies originally developed for automated and interactive theorem proving.
The resulting prototype was successfully evaluated on a corpus of tutorial
dialogs and yields good results.Comment: In Proceedings THedu'11, arXiv:1202.453
Trustworthy Formal Natural Language Specifications
Interactive proof assistants are computer programs carefully constructed to
check a human-designed proof of a mathematical claim with high confidence in
the implementation. However, this only validates truth of a formal claim, which
may have been mistranslated from a claim made in natural language. This is
especially problematic when using proof assistants to formally verify the
correctness of software with respect to a natural language specification. The
translation from informal to formal remains a challenging, time-consuming
process that is difficult to audit for correctness.
This paper shows that it is possible to build support for specifications
written in expressive subsets of natural language, within existing proof
assistants, consistent with the principles used to establish trust and
auditability in proof assistants themselves. We implement a means to provide
specifications in a modularly extensible formal subset of English, and have
them automatically translated into formal claims, entirely within the Lean
proof assistant. Our approach is extensible (placing no permanent restrictions
on grammatical structure), modular (allowing information about new words to be
distributed alongside libraries), and produces proof certificates explaining
how each word was interpreted and how the sentence's structure was used to
compute the meaning.
We apply our prototype to the translation of various English descriptions of
formal specifications from a popular textbook into Lean formalizations; all can
be translated correctly with a modest lexicon with only minor modifications
related to lexicon size.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2205.0781
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