A context switch — an act of saving and restoring the state of a CPU such that multiple processes can share a single CPU resource — is an essential feature of multitasking operating systems. Commonly computationally intensive and necessarily accessing hardware registers, context-switch procedures are implemented as inline assembly portions in C-programmed operating-system kernels. Feasible veri...

This tutorial focuses on advanced techniques to cope with the complexity of designing modern digital chips which are complete systems often containing multiple processors, complex IP blocks and high-speed buses and interconnection networks. This tutorial addresses the following emerging challenges: architectural exploration, HW/SW co-design, complex control and concurrency, correctness and veri...

Golog is a logic programming language for high-level agent control. In a recent paper, we proposed a sound but incomplete method for automatic verification of partial correctness of Golog programs where we give a number of heuristic methods to strengthen given formulas in order to discover loop invariants. However, our method does not work on arithmetic domains. On the other hand, the method of...

We prove the correctness of a sliding window protocol with an arbitrary finite window size n and sequence numbers modulo 2n. The correctness consists of showing that the sliding window protocol is branching bisimilar to a queue of capacity 2n. The proof is given entirely on the basis of an axiomatic theory. 2000 Mathematics Subject Classification: 68N30 [Specification and verification]; 68Q85 [...

Remote procedure calls (RPCs) lie at the heart of any client/server software. Thus, formal specification and verification of RPC mechanisms is a prerequisite for the verification of any such software. In this paper, we present a mathematical specification of an RPC mechanism and we outline how to prove the correctness of an implementation — say written in C — of this mechanism at the code level...

Runtime verification is an approach growing in popularity to verify the correctness of complex and distributed systems by monitoring their executions. Domain Specific Modeling Languages are a technique used for specifying such systems in an abstract way, but still close to the solution domain. This paper aims at integrating runtime verification and domain specific modeling into the development ...

In large component-based systems, the applicability of formal verification techniques to check interaction correctness among components is becoming challenging due to the concurrency of a large number of components. In our approach, we employ parallel LTL-like model checking to handle the size of the model. We present the results of the actual application of the technique to the verification of...

In this paper, we deal with the formal verification of an encryption scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Especially, we present our first results on building a framework dedicated to modelling and verification of WSNs aspects. To achieve our goal, we propose to specify WSNs models written in Petri nets using Promela constructs in order to verify correctness properties of them using SPIN...

We used formal-verification methods based on model checking to analyze the correctness properties of one existing and two new distributed-locking algorithms implemented by using MPI’s one-sided communication. Model checking exposed an overlooked correctness issue with the existing algorithm, which had been developed by relying solely on manual reasoning. Model checking also helped confirm the b...

We used formal-verification methods based on model checking to analyze the correctness properties of one existing and two new distributed-locking algorithms implemented by using MPI’s one-sided communication. Model checking exposed an overlooked correctness issue with the first algorithm, which had been developed by relying only on manual reasoning. Model checking helped confirm the basic corre...