Related papers: What Good Are Strong Specifications?
This work is concerned with the generation of formal specifications from code, using Large Language Models (LLMs) in combination with symbolic methods. Concretely, in our study, the programming language is C, the specification language is…
For engineering software with formal correctness proofs it is crucial that proofs can be efficiently reused in case the software or its specification is changed. Unfortunately, in reality even slight changes in the code or its specification…
Context: Specification mining techniques are typically used to extract the specification of a software in the absence of (up-to-date) specification documents. This is useful for program comprehension, testing, and anomaly detection.…
Emin G\"un Sirer once said: It's clear that writing a robust, secure smart contract requires extreme amounts of diligence. It's more similar to writing code for a nuclear power reactor, than to writing loose web code [...] Yet the current…
Automatically generating formal specifications including loop invariants, preconditions, and postconditions for legacy code is critical for program understanding, reuse and verification. However, the inherent complexity of control and data…
This paper investigates whether formal specifications using Java Modeling Language (JML) can enhance the quality of Large Language Model (LLM)-generated Javadocs. While LLMs excel at producing documentation from code alone, we hypothesize…
Functional languages with strong static type systems have beneficial properties to help ensure program correctness and reliability. Surprisingly, their practical significance in applications is low relative to other languages lacking in…
Cloud services must typically be distributed across a large number of machines in order to make use of multiple compute and storage resources. This opens the programmer to several sources of complexity such as concurrency, order of message…
When programming resource-scarce embedded smart devices, the designer often requires both the low-level system programming features of a language such as C and higher level capability typical of a language like Java. The choice of a…
Smart contracts are programs running on cryptocurrency (e.g., Ethereum) blockchains, whose popularity stem from the possibility to perform financial transactions, such as payments and auctions, in a distributed environment without need for…
As smart contracts are growing in size and complexity, it becomes harder and harder to ensure their correctness and security. Due to the lack of isolation mechanisms a single mistake or vulnerability in the code can bring the whole system…
Many real life optimization problems contain both hard and soft constraints, as well as qualitative conditional preferences. However, there is no single formalism to specify all three kinds of information. We therefore propose a framework,…
Refinement transforms an abstract system model into a concrete, executable program, such that properties established for the abstract model carry over to the concrete implementation. Refinement has been used successfully in the development…
Agentic AI systems can now generate code with remarkable fluency, but a fundamental question remains: \emph{does the generated code actually do what the user intended?} The gap between informal natural language requirements and precise…
We study the generalization abilities of language models when translating natural language into formal specifications with complex semantics. In particular, we fine-tune language models on three datasets consisting of English sentences and…
Building complex software systems necessitates the use of component-based architectures. In theory, of the set of components needed for a design, only some small portion of them are "custom"; the rest are reused or refactored existing…
Stepwise refinement of algebraic specifications is a well known formal methodology for program development. However, traditional notions of refinement based on signature morphisms are often too rigid to capture a number of relevant…
Fault attacks consist in changing the program behavior by injecting faults at run-time in order to break some expected security properties. Applications are hardened against fault attack adding countermeasures. According to the state of the…
A major determinant of the quality of software systems is the quality of their requirements, which should be both understandable and precise. Most requirements are written in natural language, good for understandability but lacking in…
Smart contracts have recently been adopted by many security protocols. However, existing studies lack satisfactory theoretical support on how contracts benefit security protocols. This paper aims to give a systematic analysis of smart…