Specifying and verifying reactive systems in a multi-language environment

Abstract The multi-language environment Synchronie supports the design and formal verification of synchronous reactive systems. It integrates three synchronous languages and also three ways to specify properties: the temporal logic with future operators CTL, the temporal logic with past operators Past TL, and observers, which are particular synchronous programs. It is argued that this multi-language feature provides an answer to two major issues of formal verification: facility of formalizing properties and facility of verifying large systems. The approach is illustrated with the case study of a time-triggered protocol

BlockPKI: An Automated, Resilient, and Transparent Public-Key Infrastructure

This paper describes BlockPKI, a blockchain-based public-key infrastructure that enables an automated, resilient, and transparent issuance of digital certificates. Our goal is to address several shortcomings of the current TLS infrastructure and its proposed extensions. In particular, we aim at reducing the power of individual certification authorities and make their actions publicly visible and accountable, without introducing yet another trusted third party. To demonstrate the benefits and practicality of our system, we present evaluation results and describe our prototype implementation.Comment: Workshop on Blockchain and Sharing Economy Application

Identifying Native Applications with High Assurance

The work described in this paper investigates the problem of identifying and deterring stealthy malicious processes on a host. We point out the lack of strong application iden- tication in main stream operating systems. We solve the application identication problem by proposing a novel iden- tication model in which user-level applications are required to present identication proofs at run time to be authenti- cated by the kernel using an embedded secret key. The se- cret key of an application is registered with a trusted kernel using a key registrar and is used to uniquely authenticate and authorize the application. We present a protocol for secure authentication of applications. Additionally, we de- velop a system call monitoring architecture that uses our model to verify the identity of applications when making critical system calls. Our system call monitoring can be integrated with existing policy specication frameworks to enforce application-level access rights. We implement and evaluate a prototype of our monitoring architecture in Linux as device drivers with nearly no modication of the ker- nel. The results from our extensive performance evaluation shows that our prototype incurs low overhead, indicating the feasibility of our model

Using genetic algorithms to generate test sequences for complex timed systems

The generation of test data for state based specifications is a computationally expensive process. This problem is magnified if we consider that time con- straints have to be taken into account to govern the transitions of the studied system. The main goal of this paper is to introduce a complete methodology, sup- ported by tools, that addresses this issue by represent- ing the test data generation problem as an optimisa- tion problem. We use heuristics to generate test cases. In order to assess the suitability of our approach we consider two different case studies: a communication protocol and the scientific application BIPS3D. We give details concerning how the test case generation problem can be presented as a search problem and automated. Genetic algorithms (GAs) and random search are used to generate test data and evaluate the approach. GAs outperform random search and seem to scale well as the problem size increases. It is worth to mention that we use a very simple fitness function that can be eas- ily adapted to be used with other evolutionary search techniques