In computer science, specifically software engineering and hardware engineering, formal methods are a particular kind of mathematically rigorous techniques for the specification, development 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.
Computer science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their implementation and application in computer systems. One well known subject classification system for computer science is the ACM Computing Classification System devised by the Association for Computing Machinery.
In the context of hardware and software systems, formal verification is the act of proving or disproving the correctness of intended algorithms underlying a system with respect to a certain formal specification or property, using formal methods of mathematics.
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.
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.
Gerard J. Holzmann is a Dutch-American computer scientist and researcher at Bell Labs and NASA, best known as the developer of the SPIN model checker.
Intel Trusted Execution Technology is a computer hardware technology whose primary goals are:
Dynamic program analysis is the analysis of computer software that is performed by executing programs on a real or virtual processor. For dynamic program analysis to be effective, the target program must be executed with sufficient test inputs to cover almost all possible outputs. Use of software testing measures such as code coverage helps ensure that an adequate slice of the program's set of possible behaviors has been observed. Also, care must be taken to minimize the effect that instrumentation has on the execution of the target program. Dynamic analysis is in contrast to static program analysis. Unit tests, integration tests, system tests and acceptance tests use dynamic testing.
NuSMV is a reimplementation and extension of SMV symbolic model checker, the first model checking tool based on Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs). The tool has been designed as an open architecture for model checking. It is aimed at reliable verification of industrially sized designs, for use as a backend for other verification tools and as a research tool for formal verification techniques.
PROMELA is a verification modeling language introduced by Gerard J. Holzmann. The language allows for the dynamic creation of concurrent processes to model, for example, distributed systems. In PROMELA models, communication via message channels can be defined to be synchronous, or asynchronous. PROMELA models can be analyzed with the SPIN model checker, to verify that the modeled system produces the desired behavior. An implementation verified with Isabelle/HOL is also available, as part of the Computer Aided Verification of Automata project. Files written in Promela traditionally have a .pml file extension.
Mihalis Yannakakis is Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. He is noted for his work in computational complexity, databases, and other related fields. He won the Donald E. Knuth Prize in 2005.
ISP is a tool for the formal verification of MPI programs developed within the School of Computing at the University of Utah. Like model checkers, such as SPIN, ISP verifies the complete state space of a system for a set of safety properties. However, unlike model checkers, ISP performs code level verification. This means that the tool verifies all relevant interleavings of a concurrent program by replaying the actual program code without building verification models. This idea was pioneered in a number of tools, notably by Godefroid, in his VeriSoft tool. Other recent tools of this genre include the Java Pathfinder, Microsoft's CHESS tool, and MODIST. Relevant interleavings are computed using a customized dynamic partial order reduction algorithm called POE.
CADP is a toolbox for the design of communication protocols and distributed systems. CADP is developed by the CONVECS team at INRIA Rhone-Alpes and connected to various complementary tools. CADP is maintained, regularly improved, and used in many industrial projects.
In computer programming and software development, debugging is the process of finding and resolving bugs within computer programs, software, or systems.
Concolic testing is a hybrid software verification technique that performs symbolic execution, a classical technique that treats program variables as symbolic variables, along a concrete execution path. Symbolic execution is used in conjunction with an automated theorem prover or constraint solver based on constraint logic programming to generate new concrete inputs with the aim of maximizing code coverage. Its main focus is finding bugs in real-world software, rather than demonstrating program correctness.
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.
Marta Zofia Kwiatkowska is a Polish theoretical computer scientist based in the United Kingdom. She is professor of computing in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford, England, and a Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford.
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.
