Automatic Verification

Despite their popularity and importance, pointer-based programs remain a major challenge for program verification. In this paper, we propose an automated verification system that is concise, precise and expressive for ensuring the safety of pointer-based programs. Our approach uses user-definable shape predicates to allow programmers to describe a wide range of data structures with their associated size properties. To support automatic verification, we design a new entailment checking procedure that can handle well-founded inductive predicates using unfold/fold reasoning. We have proven the soundness and termination of our verification system, and have built a prototype system.

Abstract: We present a framework that supports the formalverification of early requirements specifications. The frameworkis based on Formal Tropos, a specification language thatadopts primitive concepts for modeling early requirements(such as actor, goal, and strategic dependency), along with arich temporal specification language. We show how existingformal analysis techniques, and in particular model checking,can be adapted for the automatic verification of Formal Troposspecifications. These...

A railway interlocking system (RIS) is an embedded system (namely a supervisory control system) that ensures the safe, operation of the devices in a railway station. RIS is a safety critical system. We explore the possibility of integrating automatic formal verification methods in a given industry RIS design flow. The main obstructions to be overcome in our work are: selecting a formal verification tool that is efficient enough to solve the verification problems at hand; and devising a cost effective integration strategy for such tool. We were able to devise a successful integration strategy meeting the above constraints without requiring major modification in the pre-existent design flow nor retraining of personnel. We run verification experiments for a RIS designed for the Singapore Subway. The experiments show that the RIS design flow obtained from our integration strategy is able to automatically verify real life RIS designs

A number of recent proposals aim to incorporate security engineering into mainstream software engineering. Yet, capturing trust and security requirements at an organizational level, as opposed to an IT system level, and mapping these into security and trust management policies is still an open problem. This paper proposes a set of concepts founded on the notions of ownership, permission, and trust and intended for requirements modeling. It also extends Tropos, an agent-oriented software engineering methodology, to support security requirements engineering. These concepts are formalized and are shown to support the automatic verification of security and trust requirements using Datalog. To make the discussion more concrete, we illustrate the proposal with a Health Care case study.

Hazard analysis is a crucial task in plant design. It is expensive in terms of money and time, and involves many specialists in different disciplines who are required to analyse aspects dispersed throughout the plant documentation. Product Lifecycle Management systems allow all the project data to be handled in a complete, integrated and consistent manner; they permit tools to be

We present a novel approach to the automatic verification and falsification of LTL requirements of non-linear discrete-time hybrid systems. The verification tool uses an interval-based constraint solver for non-linear robust constraints to compute incrementally refined abstractions. Although the problem is in general undecidable, we prove termination of abstraction refinement based verification and falsification of such properties for the class of robust non-linear hybrid systems, thus significantly extending previous semi-decidability results. We argue, that safety critical control applications are robust hybrid systems. We give first results on the application of this approach to a variant of an aircraft collision avoidance protocol.