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

Metamodel Instance Generation: A systematic literature review

Modelling and thus metamodelling have become increasingly important in Software Engineering through the use of Model Driven Engineering. In this paper we present a systematic literature review of instance generation techniques for metamodels, i.e. the process of automatically generating models from a given metamodel. We start by presenting a set of research questions that our review is intended to answer. We then identify the main topics that are related to metamodel instance generation techniques, and use these to initiate our literature search. This search resulted in the identification of 34 key papers in the area, and each of these is reviewed here and discussed in detail. The outcome is that we are able to identify a knowledge gap in this field, and we offer suggestions as to some potential directions for future research.Comment: 25 page

Synthesizing Iterators from Abstraction Functions

A technique for synthesizing iterators from declarative abstraction functions written in a relational logic specification language is described. The logic includes a transitive closure operator that makes it convenient for expressing reachability queries on linked data structures. Some optimizations, including tuple elimination, iterator flattening, and traversal state reduction, are used to improve performance of the generated iterators. A case study demonstrates that most of the iterators in the widely used JDK Collections classes can be replaced with code synthesized from declarative abstraction functions. These synthesized iterators perform competitively with the hand-written originals. In a user study the synthesized iterators always passed more test cases than the hand-written ones, were almost always as efficient, usually took less programmer effort, and were the qualitative preference of all participants who provided free-form comments

Extending Nunchaku to Dependent Type Theory

Nunchaku is a new higher-order counterexample generator based on a sequence of transformations from polymorphic higher-order logic to first-order logic. Unlike its predecessor Nitpick for Isabelle, it is designed as a stand-alone tool, with frontends for various proof assistants. In this short paper, we present some ideas to extend Nunchaku with partial support for dependent types and type classes, to make frontends for Coq and other systems based on dependent type theory more useful.Comment: In Proceedings HaTT 2016, arXiv:1606.0542

Using formal methods to support testing

Formal methods and testing are two important approaches that assist in the development of high quality software. While traditionally these approaches have been seen as rivals, in recent years a new consensus has developed in which they are seen as complementary. This article reviews the state of the art regarding ways in which the presence of a formal specification can be used to assist testing

A UML/OCL framework for the analysis of fraph transformation rules

In this paper we present an approach for the analysis of graph transformation rules based on an intermediate OCL representation. We translate different rule semantics into OCL, together with the properties of interest (like rule applicability, conflicts or independence). The intermediate representation serves three purposes: (i) it allows the seamless integration of graph transformation rules with the MOF and OCL standards, and enables taking the meta-model and its OCL constraints (i.e. well-formedness rules) into account when verifying the correctness of the rules; (ii) it permits the interoperability of graph transformation concepts with a number of standards-based model-driven development tools; and (iii) it makes available a plethora of OCL tools to actually perform the rule analysis. This approach is especially useful to analyse the operational semantics of Domain Specific Visual Languages. We have automated these ideas by providing designers with tools for the graphical specification and analysis of graph transformation rules, including a backannotation mechanism that presents the analysis results in terms of the original language notation

Solving the bank with Rebel: on the design of the Rebel specification language and its application inside a bank

Large organizations like banks suffer from the ever growing complexity of their systems. Evolving the software becomes harder and harder since a single change can affect a much larger part of the system than predicted upfront. A large contributing factor to this problem is that the actual domain knowledge is often implicit, incomplete, or out of date, making it difficult to reason about the correct behavior of the system as a whole. With Rebel we aim to capture and centralize the domain knowledge and relate it to the running systems. Rebel is a formal specification language for controlling the intrinsic complexity of software for financial enterprise systems. In collaboration with ING, a large Dutch bank, we developed the Rebel specification language and an Integrated Specification Environment (ISE), currently offering automated simulation and checking of Rebel specifications using a Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solver. In this paper we report on our design choices for Rebel, the implementation and features of the ISE, and our initial observations on the application of Rebel inside the bank

A First Step in the Translation of Alloy to Coq

International audienceAlloy is both a formal language and a tool for software mod-eling. The language is basically first order relational logic. The analyzer is based on instance finding: it tries to refute assertions and if it succeeds it reports a counterexample. It works by translating Alloy models and instance finding into SAT problems. If no instance is found it does not mean the assertion is satisfied. Alloy relies on the small scope hypothesis: examining all small cases is likely to produce interesting counterexamples. This is very valuable when developing a system. However, Alloy cannot show their absence. In this paper, we propose an approach where Alloy can be used as a first step, and then using a tool we develop, Alloy models can be translated to Coq code to be proved correct interactively