Related papers: What Good Are Strong Specifications?

The use of formal methods provides confidence in the correctness of developments. Yet one may argue about the actual level of confidence obtained when the method itself -- or its implementation -- is not formally checked. We address this…

Smart contracts are programs stored on a blockchain that run when predetermined conditions are met. However, designing and implementing a smart contract is not trivial since upon deployment on a blockchain, it is no longer possible to…

Current models for software components have made component-based software engineering practical. However, these models are limited in the sense that their support for the characterization/specification of design components primarily deals…

To realize reliable quantum software, techniques to automatically ensure the quantum software's correctness have recently been investigated. However, they primarily focus on fixed quantum circuits rather than the procedure of building…

Many security and software testing applications require checking whether certain properties of a program hold for any possible usage scenario. For instance, a tool for identifying software vulnerabilities may need to rule out the existence…

We propose a methodology for verifying security properties of network protocols at design level. It can be separated in two main parts: context and requirements analysis and informal verification; and formal representation and procedural…

This paper studies the design of mechanisms that are robust to misspecification. We introduce a novel notion of robustness that connects a variety of disparate approaches and study its implications in a wide class of mechanism design…

Specifications for modular program verifiers are expressed as constraints on program states (e.g. preconditions) and relations on program states (e.g. postconditions). For programs whose domain is managing resources of any kind (e.g.…

We present a new approach to automated reasoning about higher-order programs by endowing symbolic execution with a notion of higher-order, symbolic values. Our approach is sound and relatively complete with respect to a first-order solver…

Contracts specifying a procedure's behavior in terms of pre- and postconditions are essential for scalable software verification, but cannot express any constraints on the events occurring during execution of the procedure. This…

Designing large-scale control systems to satisfy complex specifications is hard in practice, as most formal methods are limited to systems of modest size. Contract theory has been proposed as a modular alternative to formal methods in…

Formal modelling languages play a key role in the development of software since they enable users to prove correctness of system properties. However, there is still not a clear understanding on how to map a formal model to a specific…

We present a small, formal language for specifying the behavior of simple console I/O programs. The design is driven by the concrete application case of testing interactive Haskell programs written by students. Specifications are…

We present a new approach to automated reasoning about higher-order programs by extending symbolic execution to use behavioral contracts as symbolic values, enabling symbolic approximation of higher-order behavior. Our approach is based on…

Automated specification-based testing has a long history with several notable tools having emerged. For example, QuickCheck for Haskell focuses on testing against user-provided properties. Others, such as JMLUnit, use specifications in the…

Automated testing plays a crucial role in ensuring software security. It heavily relies on formal specifications to validate the correctness of the system behavior. However, the main approach to defining these formal specifications is…

Application of formal models provides many benefits for the software and system development, however, the learning curve of formal languages could be a critical factor for an industrial project. Thus, a natural language specification that…

Despite its many unquestionable benefits, formal specifications are not widely used in industrial software development. In order to reduce the time and effort required to write formal specifications, in this paper we propose a technique for…

Instrumenting programs for performing run-time checking of properties, such as regular shapes, is a common and useful technique that helps programmers detect incorrect program behaviors. This is specially true in dynamic languages such as…

Formal specification languages have long languished, due to the grave scalability problems faced by complete verification methods. Runtime verification promises to use formal specifications to automate part of the more scalable art of…