Component Technologies and Fundamental Research in Interoperability

The complexity of the software infrastructure of the information age is a significant issue affecting the security and economic viability of the U.S. Despite being of fundamental importance to the proper functioning of so much of our everyday life, these complex systems often exhibit bugs that cause system crashes and vulnerabilities to cyber attacks, such as Internet viruses and worms. As ever more complex systems are adopted for use in safety critical applications, it is important to seek methodologies that can assure these systems function as intended, and are invulnerable to interference from hackers. Formal methods have long been viewed as a promising approach to providing such technologies, but the complexities of industrial-strength systems have proven too much for the homogeneous approach most often associated with formal methods analysis. In this white paper we outline an alternative, heterogeneous approach which seeks to apply formal methods in a component-wise fashion that combines varying approaches. We motivate this approach with an example that includes a formal analysis of an event-based system, combined with a similar analysis for a state-based system. Our goal is to devise a wide range of component methods that can be applied where appropriate, and combined under the umbrella an overall formal analysis system.