Related papers: Extending Design by Contract for Aspect-Oriented P…
Black-box adversarial attacks are widely used as tools to test the robustness of deep neural networks against malicious perturbations of input data aimed at a specific change in the output of the model. Such methods, although they remain…
We introduce a new permissionless blockchain architecture called ABC. ABC is completely asynchronous, and does rely on neither randomness nor proof-of-work. ABC can be parallelized, and transactions have finality within one round trip of…
With the development of machine learning and Big Data, the concepts of linear and non-linear optimization techniques are becoming increasingly valuable for many quantitative disciplines. Problems of that nature are typically solved using…
We show that verification of object-oriented programs by means of the assertional method can be achieved in a simple way by exploiting a syntax-directed transformation from object-oriented programs to recursive programs. This transformation…
Object-oriented programming (OOP) is aimed at describing the structure and behaviour of objects by hiding the mechanism of their representation and access in primitive references. In this article we describe an approach, called…
Automated program synthesis lowers the cost of producing implementations but introduces a harder governance problem: determining which generated artifacts are admissible. Natural-language specifications are ambiguous, and example-based…
We study mechanisms that permit program components to express role constraints on clients, focusing on programmatic security mechanisms, which permit access controls to be expressed, in situ, as part of the code realizing basic…
Rely/guarantee reasoning provides a compositional way of reasoning about concurrency. The ABA problem occurs in many non-blocking concurrent data structures, where a change made by a concurrent process may be undetected by other processes.…
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been shown to be vulnerable to adversarial examples, which are slightly perturbed input images which lead DNNs to make wrong predictions. To protect from such examples, various defense strategies have been…
We present an extension-based approach for computing and verifying preferences in an abstract argumentation system. Although numerous argumentation semantics have been developed previously for identifying acceptable sets of arguments from…
The ability to negotiate contracts for a wide range of aspects and to provide services conforming to them is a most pressing need in service-oriented architectures. High-level models of contracts are making their way into the area, but…
Higher-order constructs enable more expressive and concise code by allowing procedures to be parameterized by other procedures. Assertions allow expressing partial program specifications, which can be verified either at compile time…
Agentic security systems increasingly combine LLM planners with tools that can discover, validate, and report vulnerabilities. This creates an asymmetric control problem: the system should retain strong offensive capability inside an…
This paper suggests a [email protected] of composable specification of concurrent programs that permits: (1) verification of program code for a given specification, and (2) composition of the specifications of the components to yield…
Correctness is a necessary condition for systems to be effective in meeting human demands, thus playing a critical role in system development. However, correctness often manifests as a nebulous concept in practice, leading to challenges in…
We propose here to look at how abstract a model of a usable system can be, but still say something useful and interesting, so this paper is an exercise in abstraction and formalisation, with usability-of-design as an example target use. We…
To improve the quality of programs we provide an approach to guidance in the process of program development. At the higher level the various activities and their dependencies to structure the process are identified. At the lower level,…
Design-by-contract is an important technique for model-based design in which a composite system is specified by a collection of contracts that specify the behavioural assumptions and guarantees of each component. In this paper, we describe…
In the combinatorial action model of contract design, a principal delegates a complex project to an agent, incentivizing a subset of actions from a ground set of $n$ actions, via a linear contract. Computing the optimal contract is a…
Producing a good software design involves not only writing a definition that satisfies the syntax of the chosen language or structural constraints of a design paradigm. It also involves upholding a variety of expectations about the behavior…