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The Pentium FDIV bug is a hardware bug affecting the floating-point unit (FPU) of the early Intel Pentium processors. Because of the bug, the processor would return incorrect binary floating point results when dividing certain pairs of high-precision numbers. The bug was discovered in 1994 by Thomas R. Nicely, a professor of mathematics at Lynchburg College. Missing values in a lookup table used by the FPU's floating-point division algorithm led to calculations acquiring small errors. While these errors would in most use-cases only occur rarely and result in small deviations from the correct output values, in certain circumstances the errors can occur frequently and lead to more significant deviations.
In computer science, static program analysis is the analysis of computer programs performed without executing them, in contrast with dynamic program analysis, which is performed on programs during their execution in the integrated environment.
In computer science, formal methods are mathematically rigorous techniques for the specification, development, analysis, and verification of software and hardware systems. The use of formal methods for software and hardware design is motivated by the expectation that, as in other engineering disciplines, performing appropriate mathematical analysis can contribute to the reliability and robustness of a design.
In computer programming, a type system is a logical system comprising a set of rules that assigns a property called a type to every term. Usually the terms are various language constructs of a computer program, such as variables, expressions, functions, or modules. A type system dictates the operations that can be performed on a term. For variables, the type system determines the allowed values of that term.
In the context of hardware and software systems, formal verification is the act of proving or disproving the correctness of a system with respect to a certain formal specification or property, using formal methods of mathematics. Formal verification is a key incentive for formal specification of systems, and is at the core of formal methods. It represents an important dimension of analysis and verification in electronic design automation and is one approach to software verification. The use of formal verification enables the highest Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL7) in the framework of common criteria for computer security certification.
In computer science, model checking or property checking is a method for checking whether a finite-state model of a system meets a given specification. This is typically associated with hardware or software systems, where the specification contains liveness requirements as well as safety requirements.
Software verification is a discipline of software engineering, programming languages, and theory of computation whose goal is to assure that software satisfies the expected requirements.
ESC/Java, the "Extended Static Checker for Java," is a programming tool that attempts to find common run-time errors in Java programs at compile time. The underlying approach used in ESC/Java is referred to as extended static checking, which is a collective name referring to a range of techniques for statically checking the correctness of various program constraints. For example, that an integer variable is greater-than-zero, or lies between the bounds of an array. This technique was pioneered in ESC/Java and can be thought of as an extended form of type checking. Extended static checking usually involves the use of an automated theorem prover and, in ESC/Java, the Simplify theorem prover was used.
The Berkeley Lazy Abstraction Software verification Tool (BLAST) is a software model checking tool for C programs. The task addressed by BLAST is the need to check whether software satisfies the behavioral requirements of its associated interfaces. BLAST employs counterexample-driven automatic abstraction refinement to construct an abstract model that is then model-checked for safety properties. The abstraction is constructed on the fly, and only to the requested precision.
Java Pathfinder (JPF) is a system to verify executable Java bytecode programs. JPF was developed at the NASA Ames Research Center and open sourced in 2005. The acronym JPF is not to be confused with the unrelated Java Plugin Framework project.
This is an alphabetical list of articles pertaining specifically to software engineering.
Functional verification is the task of verifying that the logic design conforms to specification. Functional verification attempts to answer the question "Does this proposed design do what is intended?" This is complex and takes the majority of time and effort in most large electronic system design projects. Functional verification is a part of more encompassing design verification, which, besides functional verification, considers non-functional aspects like timing, layout and power.
Extended static checking (ESC) is a collective name in computer science for a range of techniques for statically checking the correctness of various program constraints. ESC can be thought of as an extended form of type checking. As with type checking, ESC is performed automatically at compile time. This distinguishes it from more general approaches to the formal verification of software, which typically rely on human-generated proofs. Furthermore, it promotes practicality over soundness, in that it aims to dramatically reduce the number of false positives at the cost of introducing some false negatives. ESC can identify a range of errors that are currently outside the scope of a type checker, including division by zero, array out of bounds, integer overflow and null dereferences.
TLA+ is a formal specification language developed by Leslie Lamport. It is used for designing, modelling, documentation, and verification of programs, especially concurrent systems and distributed systems. TLA+ is considered to be exhaustively-testable pseudocode, and its use likened to drawing blueprints for software systems; TLA is an acronym for Temporal Logic of Actions.
Device drivers are programs which allow software or higher-level computer programs to interact with a hardware device. These software components act as a link between the devices and the operating systems, communicating with each of these systems and executing commands. They provide an abstraction layer for the software above and also mediate the communication between the operating system kernel and the devices below.
CPAchecker is a framework and tool for formal software verification, and program analysis, of C programs. Some of its ideas and concepts, for example lazy abstraction, were inherited from the software model checker BLAST. CPAchecker is based on the idea of configurable program analysis which is a concept that allows expression of both model checking and program analysis with one formalism. When executed, CPAchecker performs a reachability analysis, i.e., it checks whether a certain state, which violates a given specification, can potentially be reached.
Infer, sometimes referred to as "Facebook Infer", is a static code analysis tool developed by an engineering team at Facebook along with open-source contributors. It provides support for Java, C, C++, and Objective-C, and is deployed at Facebook in the analysis of its Android and iOS apps.
Z3, also known as the Z3 Theorem Prover, is a satisfiability modulo theories (SMT) solver developed by Microsoft.
Kenneth L. McMillan is an American computer scientist working in the area of formal methods, logic, and programming languages. He is a professor in the computer science department at the University of Texas at Austin, where he holds the Admiral B.R. Inman Centennial Chair in Computing Theory.
References
- ↑ Ball, Thomas; Cook, Byron; Levin, Vladimir; and Rajamani, Sriram K.; SLAM and Static Driver Verifier: Technology Transfer of Formal Methods inside Microsoft; Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), Vol. 2999: Boiten, Eerke A.; Derrick, John; and Smith, Graeme; eds.; Fourth International Conference on Integrated Formal Methods (IFM 2004), 4–7 April 2004, Canterbury, GB, Springer, Berlin/Heidelberg, pp. 1–20
- ↑ Ball, Thomas; Levin, Vladimir; and Rajamani, Sriram K.; A decade of software model checking with SLAM; Communications of the ACM, Vol. 54(7), pp. 68–76 (July 2011)
- ↑ Mondok, Matt; Microsoft's Slam: stay in touch with, stalk your friends; Ars Technica, 2006 October 10
