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Formal languages are increasingly used to describe the functional requirements (specifications) of circuits. These requirements are used as a means to communicate design intent and as basis for verification. In both settings it is of utmost importance that the specifications are of high quality. However, formal requirements are seldom the object of validation, even though they can be hard to understand and interactions between them can be subtle. In this paper we present techniques and guidelines to explore and assure the quality of a formal specification. We define a technique to interactively explore the semantics of a specification by simulating its behavior for user-defined scenarios. Furthermore, we define techniques to automatically check specifications against a set of user-provided assertions, which must be satisfied, and a set of possibilities, which must not be contradicted. The proposed techniques support the user in the iterative development and refinement of high-quality specifications.

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Abstract. The DEGAS project aims at enriching standard UML-centred development environments in such a way that the developers of global applications can exploit automated formal analyses with minimal overhead. In this paper, we present For-LySa, an instantiation of the DEGAS approach for authentication analysis, which exploits an existing analysis tool developed for the process calculus LySa. We discuss what information is needed for the analysis, and how to build the UML model of an authentication protocol in such a way that the needed information can be extracted from the model. We then present our prototype implementation and report on some promising results of its use.

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