Handling State Space Explosion in Component-Based Software Verification: A Review

Abstract

Component-based software development (CBSD) is an alternative approach to constructing software systems that offers numerous benefits, particularly in decreasing the complexity of system design. However, deploying components into a system is a challenging and error-prone task. Model-checking is one of the reliable methods to systematically analyze the correctness of a system. Its brute-force checking of the system's state space assists to significantly expand the level of confidence in the system. Nevertheless, model-checking is limited by a critical problem called state space explosion (SSE). To benefit from modelchecking, an appropriate method is required to reduce SSE. In the past two decades, a great number of SSE reduction methods have been proposed containing many similarities, dissimilarities, and unclear concepts in some cases. This research, firstly, plans to present a review of SSE handling methods and classify them based on their similarities, principle, and characteristics. Second, it investigates the methods for handling SSE problem in the verification process of CBSD and provides insight into the potential limitations, underlining the key challenges for future research efforts. INDEX TERMSComponent-based software development, Verification of software components, Modelchecking, State space explosion.

Finding More Bugs with Software Model Checking using Delta Debugging

“…Usually large-scale software systems are divided into components. Software verification can benefit off this structure via interface rule, assume-guaranty reasoning, or other techniques oriented on componentbased software verification [15]. Contrarily, decomposition of specification can also be useful [16].…”

“…Incremental verification [15] and extreme model checking [17] can be used with incremental software system development and extreme programming, respectively. This way software verification benefits from the fact that most part of the software system was already verified, therefore verification of the new version of the software is approachable.…”

Design and Analysis of Self-protection: Adaptive Security for Software-Intensive Systems

“…As a result, trust can be established among system entities and in the fairness of the enforcement mechanisms while at the same time allowing entities to formulate and enforce their own security policies. However, approaches based on formal methods often suffer from scalability issues [190] that need to be addressed for them to be applicable to facilitate self-protection.…”

“…Component-based systems Nejati et al [190] provide a review of approaches to tackle state space explosion in component-based system verification. In [22], the authors use a contract-based design to specify correct interactions between modules and incrementally verify changes.…”

“…One way to abstract away the details is to perform the analysis at the architectural level where the internal behaviour of the components is omitted [135]. Even though architecture-level security analysis reduces the complexity to some extent, the scalability of formal techniques such as model checking is still limited when analysing component-based systems due to the state space explosion problem [190] (C4). Modular verification is a common method to tackle complexity.…”