Software Reliability Methods

Peled, Doron; Gries, David; Schneider, Fred B.

doi:10.1007/978-1-4757-3540-6

Cited by 153 publications

(76 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…For a more complete introduction, we refer to [14]. For a concise overview of formal methods and their applications in software verification, we refer to [33].…”

Section: Process Algebramentioning

confidence: 99%

Formal specification and verification of TCP extended with the Window Scale Option

Lockefeer

Williams

Fokkink

2016

Science of Computer Programming

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The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) aims to provide a reliable transport service between two parties that communicate over a possibly faulty network. The responsibilities of TCP can roughly be divided into two categories: connection management and data transmission. Connection management sets up the connections, manages the byte streams and their corresponding states and ensures that connections are closed in a safe manner. Data transmission involves the transfer of segments from the sender to the receiver.The specification of TCP is far from formal and very complex. The original protocol was only specified in natural language in RFC 793. As TCP was implemented on a large scale, several ambiguities and other issues surfaced. RFC 1122 clarified some of these ambiguities and proposed solutions for many issues. Moreover, the networks that TCP operates over have changed remarkably over the years, and have now reached a bandwidth and speed that had never been envisioned at the time that the protocol was originally defined. To ensure reliable and efficient operation of TCP over these modern networks, RFC 1323 proposes the Window Scale Option that enables the use of windows larger than 2 16 .For complex systems, formal specification and verification can be used to manage their complexity. The approach is twofold: first, the system is modelled using formal techniques that have mathematical underpinnings, to obtain a specification. To this specification, verification techniques are then applied to verify the correctness of the system.In this work, we give a formal specification of TCP extended with the Window Scale Option using the process algebra µCRL. Due to the complexity of the protocol, our specification focuses on the data transfer phase and connection teardown. From this specification, we obtain a model of unidirectional data transfer and show that its external behaviour is branching bisimilar to a FIFO Queue. In addition, we obtain a model for the connection teardown phase and prove several properties that represent its correctness.1

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“…For a more complete introduction, we refer to [14]. For a concise overview of formal methods and their applications in software verification, we refer to [33].…”

Section: Process Algebramentioning

confidence: 99%

Formal specification and verification of TCP extended with the Window Scale Option

Lockefeer

Williams

Fokkink

2016

Science of Computer Programming

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“…The system is translated first into a collection of atomic actions [17,21] (or simply actions). Atomic actions are the smallest visible units that can be observed to induce a change in the system.…”

Section: Preliminariesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automatic Verification of Annotated Code

Peled

2003

Formal Techniques for Networked and Distributed Systems - FORTE 2003

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Abstract. Model checking is an automatic approach for the verification of systems. Explicit states model checking applies a search algorithm (e.g., depth or breadth first search) to the state space of the verified system. In concurrent systems, and in particular in communication protocols, the number of states can grow exponentially with the number of independent components (processes). There are many different methods that attempt to automatically reduce the number of checked states. Such methods show encouraging results, but often still fail to reduce the number of states required for the verification to become manageable. We propose here the use of code annotation in order to control the verification process and reduce the number of states searched. Our extension of the C programming language allows the user to put into the code instructions that are executed by the model checker during the verification. With the new language construct, we may exploit additional insight that the verifier may have about the checked program in order to limit the search. We describe our implementation and present some experimental results.

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“…Its basic idea consists of representing a program or a system as a Kripke structure, representing a specification as a temporal logic formula, and checking automatically whether the formula holds in the model [15]. Generally, Binary Decision Diagrams [1] are used to symbolically represent the transition relations and sets of states.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%