Formal verification has seen much success in several domains of hardware and software design. For example, in hardware verification there has been much work in the verification of microprocessors (e.g. [1]) and memory systems (e.g. [2]). Similarly, software verification has seen success in device-drivers (e.g. [3]) and concurrent software (e.g. [4]). The area of network verification, which cons...

Ensuring the correctness of software applications is a difficult task. The area of runtime verification, which combines the approaches of formal verification and testing, offers a practical but limited solution that can help in finding many errors in software. Runtime verification relies upon tools for monitoring software execution. There are particular difficulties with regard to monitoring em...

Safety-critical software systems call for effective analysis that ensures the correctness of the systems. HUME is a functional programming language, targeted at safety-critical systems, which supports such analysis for time and space, but does not support verification. This topic is explored by using an off-the-shelf design verification system called SPIN. The result is then empirically analysed.

In this paper we define a new verification method based on an assertion language able to express properties defined by the user through a logic program. We first apply the verification framework defined in [3] to derive sufficient inductive conditions to prove partial correctness. Then we show how the resulting conditions can be proved using program transformation techniques.

Complete formal verification is the only known way to guarantee that a system is free of programming errors. They present their experience in performing the formal, machine-checked verification of the seL4 microkernel from an abstract specification down to its C implementation. According to this paper, this is the first formal proof of functional correctness of a complete, general-purpose opera...

Correctness of compilers is a vital precondition for the correctness of the software translated by them. In this paper, we present two approaches for the formalization of static single assignment (SSA) form together with two corresponding formal proofs in the Isabelle/HOL system, each showing the correctness of code generation. Our comparison between the two proofs shows that it is very importa...

Writing correct explicitly-parallel programs can be very challenging. While the functional correctness of a program can often be understood largely sequentially, a software engineer must simultaneously reason about the nondeterministic parallel interleavings of the program’s threads of execution. This complication is similarly a challenge to automated verification efforts. Thus, we argue that i...

This chapter describes the first half of the formal, machine-supported verification of a Prolog compiler with the KIV system. Our work is based on the mathematical analysis given in (Börger and Rosenzweig, 1995), where an operational semantics (an “interpreter”) for Prolog is defined as an Abstract State Machine (ASM). This interpreter is then transformed in 12 systematic refinements to an ASM ...

Interactive theorem provers typically use abstract algebraic data structures to focus on algorithmic correctness. Verification of programs in real programming languages also has deal with pointer structures, aliasing and, the case C, memory management. While progress been made by using Separation Logic, direct verification code still both aspects at once. In this paper, we show a refinement-bas...

Software is used in many safetyand security-critical systems. Software development is, however, an error-prone task where a software developer tries to precisely formalize in a programming language their imprecise ideas about a program. Formal methods help to reduce this problem. These methods add another layer to the software development allowing to formalize and to check desired properties of...