User-friendly Support for Common Concepts in a Lightweight Verifier

Machine verification of formal arguments can only increase our confidence in the correctness of those arguments, but the costs of employing machine verification still outweigh the benefits for some common kinds of formal reasoning activities. As a result, usability is becoming increasingly important in the design of formal verification tools. We describe the "aartifact" lightweight verification system, designed for processing formal arguments involving basic, ubiquitous mathematical concepts. The system is a prototype for investigating potential techniques for improving the usability of formal verification systems. It leverages techniques drawn both from existing work and from our own efforts. In addition to a parser for a familiar concrete syntax and a mechanism for automated syntax lookup, the system integrates (1) a basic logical inference algorithm, (2) a database of propositions governing common mathematical concepts, and (3) a data structure that computes congruence closures of expressions involving relations found in this database. Together, these components allow the system to better accommodate the expectations of users interested in verifying formal arguments involving algebraic and logical manipulations of numbers, sets, vectors, and related operators and predicates. We demonstrate the reasonable performance of this system on typical formal arguments and briefly discuss how the system's design contributed to its usability in two case studies

Ontology Support for a Lightweight Formal Verification System

The usability of verification systems is becoming increasingly important, and the effective integration of ontologies of formal facts (definitions, propositions, and syntactic idioms) into machine verification systems will likely play a role in improving the usability of such systems. The "aartifact" lightweight verification system utilizes an ontology of formal propositions in order to support lightweight verification of formal arguments that involve common mathematical concepts. The ontology is stored within a relational database, and can be assembled and extended using a simple web interface by contributors who are domain experts. The database can be compiled into two separate components of the "aartifact" system: a verifier component that computes congruence closures of expressions containing relations and predicates found in the ontology, and a JavaScript application that interactively presents to users information about the constants, operators, relations, predicates, syntactic constructs, and idioms found in the ontology (and, thus, supported by the verifier). In this way, the database serves to improve both the verification system's capacity to infer implicit applications of logical propositions within a user's formal argument, and to inform users in a context-aware and structured manner of the verification system's capabilities and limitations

A User-friendly Interface for a Lightweight Verification System

User-friendly interfaces can play an important role in bringing the benefits of a machine-readable representation of formal arguments to a wider audience. The "aartifact" system is an easy-to-use lightweight verifier for formal arguments that involve logical and algebraic manipulations of common mathematical concepts. The system provides validation capabilities by utilizing a database of propositions governing common mathematical concepts. The "aartifact" system's multi-faceted interactive user interface combines several approaches to user-friendly interface design: (1) a familiar and natural syntax based on existing conventions in mathematical practice, (2) a real-time keyword-based lookup mechanism for interactive, context-sensitive discovery of the syntactic idioms and semantic concepts found in the system's database of propositions, and (3) immediate validation feedback in the form of reformatted raw input. The system's natural syntax and database of propositions allow it to meet a user's expectations in the formal reasoning scenarios for which it is intended. The real-time keyword-based lookup mechanism and validation feedback allow the system to teach the user about its capabilities and limitations in an immediate, interactive, and context-aware manner

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

A User-friendly Interface for a Lightweight Verification System

User-friendly interfaces can play an important role in bringing the benefits of a machine-readable representation of formal arguments to a wider audience. The "aartifact" system is an easy-to-use lightweight verifier for formal arguments that involve logical and algebraic manipulations of common mathematical concepts. The system provides validation capabilities by utilizing a database of propositions governing common mathematical concepts. The "aartifact" system's multi-faceted interactive user interface combines several approaches to user-friendly interface design: (1) a familiar and natural syntax based on existing conventions in mathematical practice, (2) a real-time keyword-based lookup mechanism for interactive, context-sensitive discovery of the syntactic idioms and semantic concepts found in the system's database of propositions, and (3) immediate validation feedback in the form of reformatted raw input. The system's natural syntax and database of propositions allow it to meet a user's expectations in the formal reasoning scenarios for which it is intended. The real-time keyword-based lookup mechanism and validation feedback allow the system to teach the user about its capabilities and limitations in an immediate, interactive, and context-aware manner

Seamless composition and integration: a perspective on formal methods research

Formal methods are now a central component of computer-science education and research. However, there will always be advances in mathematical logic -- a.k.a. `formal methods' among computer scientists -- leading to advances in reliable, safe and secure computing. There are many research directions that will promote the impact of formal methods on computer science in significant and novel ways. We outline two directions, each associated with its own research challenges, that are complementary to the current state-of-the-art: one of composability and one of integration, each considered in a specific context drawn from our own recent research and teaching experience. We try to clarify why the study and ultimate resolution of these two challenges hold the promise of important breakthroughs in the accessability of formal methods and, ultimately, their applicability.National Science Foundation (CCF-0820138

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

Security of Ubiquitous Computing Systems

The chapters in this open access book arise out of the EU Cost Action project Cryptacus, the objective of which was to improve and adapt existent cryptanalysis methodologies and tools to the ubiquitous computing framework. The cryptanalysis implemented lies along four axes: cryptographic models, cryptanalysis of building blocks, hardware and software security engineering, and security assessment of real-world systems. The authors are top-class researchers in security and cryptography, and the contributions are of value to researchers and practitioners in these domains. This book is open access under a CC BY license

Formal Analysis of Network Protocols

Today’s Internet is becoming increasingly complex and fragile. Current performance centric techniques on network analysis and runtime verification have became inadequate in the development of robust networks. To cope with these challenges there is a growing interest in the use of formal analysis techniques to reason about network protocol correctness throughout the network development cycle. This talk surveys recent work on the use of formal analysis techniques to aid in design, implementation, and analysis of network protocols. We first present a general framework that covers a majority of existing formal analysis techniques on both the control and routing planes of networks, and present a classification and taxonomy of techniques according to the proposed framework. Using four representative case studies (Metarouting, rcc, axiomatic formulation, and Alloy based analysis), we discuss various aspects of formal network analysis, including formal specification, formal verification, and system validation. Their strengths and limitations are evaluated and compared in detail