Related papers: Specifying a Realistic File System
Implementing correct distributed systems is an error-prone task. Runtime Verification (RV) offers a lightweight formal method to improve reliability by monitoring system executions against correctness properties. However, applying RV in…
The C/C++11 (C11) standard offers a spectrum of ordering guarantees on memory access operations. The combinations of such orderings pose a challenge in developing correct and efficient weak memory programs. A common solution to preclude…
Compiler-based Control-Flow Integrity (CFI) offers strong forward-edge protection but remains challenging to deploy in large C/C++ software due to visibility mismatches, type inconsistencies, and unintended behavioral failures. We present…
Considering the current price gap between disk and flash memory drives, for applications dealing with large scale data, it will be economically more sensible to use flash memory drives to supplement disk drives rather than to replace them.…
Runtime verification is an effective automated method for specification-based offline testing and analysis as well as online monitoring of complex systems. The specification language is often a variant of regular expressions or a popular…
The stochastic modelling of biological systems is an informative, and in some cases, very adequate technique, which may however result in being more expensive than other modelling approaches, such as differential equations. We present…
Autonomous critical systems, such as satellites and space rovers, must be able to detect the occurrence of faults in order to ensure correct operation. This task is carried out by Fault Detection and Identification (FDI) components, that…
Recovering high-level type information in binaries is a key task in reverse engineering and binary analysis. Binaries contain very little explicit type information. The structure of binary code is incredibly flexible allowing for ad-hoc…
We present Unit-B, a formal method inspired by Event-B and UNITY. Unit-B aims at the stepwise design of software systems satisfying safety and liveness properties. The method features the novel notion of coarse and fine schedules, a…
High-Level Synthesis (HLS) is emerging as a mainstream design methodology, allowing software designers to enjoy the benefits of a hardware implementation. Significant work has led to effective compilers that produce high-quality hardware…
Formal verification techniques have been playing an important role in pre-silicon validation processes. One of the most important points considered in performing formal verification is to define good verification scopes; we should define…
The verification and validation of cyber-physical systems is known to be a difficult problem due to the different modeling abstractions used for control components and for software components. A recent trend to address this difficulty is to…
A computing job in a big data system can take a long time to run, especially for pipelined executions on data streams. Developers often need to change the computing logic of the job such as fixing a loophole in an operator or changing the…
Extended Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) has emerged as a powerful method to extend packet-processing functionality in the Linux operating system. BPF allows users to write code in high-level languages (like C or Rust) and execute them at…
The standardization of NVMe Zoned Namespaces (ZNS) in the NVMe 2.0 specification presents a unique new addition to storage devices. Unlike traditional SSDs, where the flash media management idiosyncrasies are hidden behind a flash…
File systems must allocate space for files without knowing what will be added or removed in the future. Over the life of a file system, this may cause suboptimal file placement decisions that eventually lead to slower performance, or aging.…
We present the software system developed to implement the Locus Algorithm, a novel algorithm designed to maximise the performance of differential photometry systems by optimising the number and quality of reference stars in the Field of…
Breadth-first search (BFS) is a fundamental graph algorithm that presents significant challenges for parallel implementation due to irregular memory access patterns, load imbalance and synchronization overhead. In this paper, we introduce a…
Techniques for runtime verification often utilise specification languages that are (i) reasonably expressive, and (ii) relatively abstract (i.e. they operate on a level of abstraction that separates them from the system being monitored).…
In this paper we present a tool for the formal analysis of applications built on top of replicated databases, where data integrity can be at stake. To address this issue, one can introduce synchronization in the system. Introducing…