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Proof-Carrying Apps: Contract-Based Deployment-Time Verification

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Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation: Foundational Techniques (ISoLA 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 9952))

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Abstract

For extensible software platforms in safety-critical domains, it is important that deployed plug-ins work as specified. This is especially true with the prospect of allowing third parties to add plug-ins. We propose a contract-based approach for deployment-time verification. Every plug-in guarantees its functional behavior under a specific set of assumptions towards its environment. With proof-carrying apps, we generalize proof-carrying code from proofs to artifacts that facilitate deployment-time verification, where the expected behavior is specified by the means of design-by-contract. With proof artifacts, the conformance of apps to environment assumptions is checked during deployment, even on resource-constrained devices. This procedure prevents unsafe operation by unintended programming mistakes as well as intended malicious behavior. We discuss which criteria a formal verification technique has to fulfill to be applicable to proof-carrying apps and evaluate the verification tools KeY and Soot for proof-carrying apps.

This work was partially supported by the DFG (German Research Foundation) under the Researcher Unit FOR1800: Controlling Concurrent Change (CCC).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://clang-analyzer.llvm.org/.

  2. 2.

    http://babelfish.arc.nasa.gov/trac/jpf.

  3. 3.

    https://github.com/StevenArzt/.

  4. 4.

    http://saturn.stanford.edu.

  5. 5.

    http://www.key-project.org/eclipse/KeYResources/index.html.

  6. 6.

    http://frama-c.com/index.html.

  7. 7.

    http://vcc.codeplex.com/.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Christoph Seidl for his support in earlier phases of the paper. We gratefully acknowledge the support of Eric Bodden and Steven Arzt with Soot and Reviser.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Software Engineering and Automotive Informatics, TU Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany

    Sönke Holthusen, Michael Nieke, Thomas Thüm & Ina Schaefer

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  1. Sönke Holthusen
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  2. Michael Nieke
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  3. Thomas Thüm
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Correspondence to Ina Schaefer .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Lero, Limerick, Ireland

    Tiziana Margaria

  2. TU Dortmund, Dortmund, Germany

    Bernhard Steffen

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Holthusen, S., Nieke, M., Thüm, T., Schaefer, I. (2016). Proof-Carrying Apps: Contract-Based Deployment-Time Verification. In: Margaria, T., Steffen, B. (eds) Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation: Foundational Techniques. ISoLA 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9952. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47166-2_58

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47166-2_58

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