Related papers: What Good Are Strong Specifications?

Feature requests are proposed by users to request new features or enhancements of existing features of software products, which represent users' wishes and demands. Satisfying users' demands can benefit the product from both competitiveness…

Code Sensitivity refers to the ability of Code LLMs to recognize and respond to details changes in problem descriptions. While current code benchmarks and instruction data focus on difficulty and diversity, sensitivity is overlooked. We…

Formal verification provides mathematical guarantees that a software is correct. Design-level verification tools ensure software specifications are correct, but they do not expose defects in actual implementations. For this purpose,…

The advent of large-scale, complex computing systems has dramatically increased the difficulties of securing accesses to systems' resources. To ensure confidentiality and integrity, the exploitation of access control mechanisms has thus…

With the progress in deductive program verification research, new tools and techniques have become available to support design-by-contract reasoning about non-trivial programs written in widely-used programming languages. However, deductive…

In dynamic architectures, component activation and connections between components may vary over time. With the emergence of mobile computing such architectures became increasingly important and several techniques emerged to support in their…

The work concerns automatic generation of logical specifications from requirements models. Logical specifications obtained in such a way can be subjected to formal verification using deductive reasoning. Formal verification concerns…

Estimating the effort and quality of a system is a critical step at the beginning of every software project. It is necessary to have reliable ways of calculating these measures, and, it is even better when the calculation can be done as…

Developing secure smart contracts remains a challenging task. Existing approaches are either impractical or leave the burden to developers for fixing bugs. In this paper, we propose the first practical smart contract compiler, called HCC,…

We propose a performance evaluation method for security protocols. Based on the informal specification, we construct a canonical model which includes, alongside protocol messages, cryptographic operations performed by participants in the…

Software built on poor structural patterns often shows higher exposure to security defects. When code differs from established best practices, verification and maintenance become increasingly difficult, thereby raising the risk of…

The functional properties of a program are often specified by providing a contract for each of its functions. A contract of a function consists of a pair of formulas, called a precondition and a postcondition, which, respectively, should…

Recently efficient model-checking tools have been developed to find flaws in security protocols specifications. These flaws can be interpreted as potential attacks scenarios but the feasability of these scenarios need to be confirmed at the…

Semantic properties are domain-specific specification constructs used to augment an existing language with richer semantics. These properties are taken advantage of in system analysis, design, implementation, testing, and maintenance…

The use of asserts in code has received increasing attention in the software engineering community in the past few years, even though it has been a recognized programming construct for many decades. A previous empirical study by Casalnuovo…

Imposing constraints on the output of a Deep Neural Net is one way to improve the quality of its predictions while loosening the requirements for labeled training data. Such constraints are usually imposed as soft constraints by adding new…

Strings are ubiquitous in code. Not all strings are created equal, some contain structure that makes them incompatible with other strings. CSS units are an obvious example. Worse, type checkers cannot see this structure: this is the latent…

In this paper, we present a novel marriage of static and dynamic analysis. Given a large code base with many functions and a mature test suite, we propose using static analysis to find functions 1) with assertions or other evident…

[Context] Applying design principles has long been acknowledged as beneficial for understanding and maintainability in traditional software projects. These benefits may similarly hold for Machine Learning (ML) projects, which involve…

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) demands robust, unbiased, and scalable evaluation methods. However, human annotations are costly to scale, model-based evaluations are susceptible to stylistic biases, and…