The aim of AOARD project #FA2386-12-1-4022 (“Formal System Verification Extension 2”, running from 9 February 2012 to 8 August 2012) is to provide an initial framework prototype for efficiently performing formal proofs of targeted security or safety properties about large, complex software systems. The framework is meant to be generic in terms of the targeted property for the system and to mini...

This report documents the program and the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 16421 Universality of Proofs which took place October 16–21, 2016. The seminar was motivated by the fact that it is nowadays difficult to exchange proofs from one proof assistant to another one. Thus a formal proof cannot be considered as a universal proof, reusable in different contexts. The seminar aims at providing a comp...

Co-designing software or hardware systems and their formal proofs is an appealing idea, with the expectation that the rigor enforced by formal methods will percolate the whole design. In practice however, carrying out formal proofs while designing even a relatively simple system can be an exercise in frustration, with a great deal of time spent attempting to prove things about broken definition...

We report on the first formal pervasive verification of an operating system microkernel featuring the correctness of inline assembly, large non-trivial C portions, and concurrent devices in a single seamless formal proof. We integrated all relevant verification results we had achieved so far [21,20,2,5,4] into a single top-level theorem of microkernel correctness. This theorem states the simula...

The goal of this note is to give a presentation of a formal proof of the Sasaki-Murao algorithm [SM82]. This is an elegant algorithm for computing the determinant of a square matrix over an arbitrary commutative ring in polynomial time. Usual presentations of this algorithm are quite complex, and rely on some Sylvester identities [AL04]. We believe that the proof we shall present, which was obt...

Tools and methods for the specification and design of computer systems are increasing in sophistication. Much current research and development is attempting to exploit this sophistication to improve the effectiveness of systems development practices. It is becoming feasible to offer much higher assurance than hitherto that systems meet critical requirements, e.g. concerning safety or security. ...

For many years, I have been interested in introducing students to the development of complex systems by means of modelling and refinement. To this end, I did not find anything better than presenting many examples of system developments. This is due to my inability to propose a unified theoretical treatment on this matter. Of course, in these examples, I am always pointing out the importance of ...

Progress is investigated for a shared-memory distributed system with a form of fault tolerance that allows processes to stop and restart functioning without notiication. A concept of bounded fairness is introduced to formalize bounded delay under the assumption that each family of related processes continuously contains at least one active member. This is a generalization of wait-freedom, and a...

Since the 1930s, the subject of formal language theory, also known as automata theory, has been developed by computer scientists, linguists and mathematicians. Formal languages (or simply languages) are sets of strings over finite sets of symbols, called alphabets, and various ways of describing such languages have been developed and studied, including regular expressions (which " generate " la...