For optimal placement and orchestration of network services, it is crucial that their structure and semantics are specified clearly and comprehensively and are available to an orchestrator. Existing specification approaches are either ambiguous or miss important aspects regarding the behavior of virtual network functions (VNFs) forming a service. We propose to formally and unambiguously specify the behavior of these functions and services using Queuing Petri Nets (QPNs). QPNs are an established method that allows to express queuing, synchronization, stochastically distributed processing delays, and changing traffic volume and characteristics at each VNF. With QPNs, multiple VNFs can be connected to complete network services in any structure, even specifying bidirectional network services containing loops. We discuss how management and orchestration systems can benefit from our clear and comprehensive specification approach, leading to better placement of VNFs and improved Quality of Service. Another benefit of formally specifying network services with QPNs are diverse analysis options, which allow valuable insights such as the distribution of end-to-end delay. We propose a tool-based workflow that supports the specification of network services and the automatic generation of corresponding simulation code to enable an in-depth analysis of their behavior and performance.

Information flow analysis investigates the flow of data in applications, checking in particular for flows from private sources to public sinks. Flow- and path-sensitive analyses are, however, often too costly to be performed every time a security-critical application is run. In this paper, we propose a variant of proof carrying code for information flow security. To this end, we develop information flow (IF) certificates which get attached to programs as well as a method for IF certificate validation. We prove soundness of our technique, i.e., show it to be tamper-free. The technique is implemented within the program analysis tool CPAchecker. Our experiments confirm that the use of certificates pays off for costly analysis runs.

Information Flow Analysis (IFA) aims at detecting illegal flows of information between program entities. “Legality” is therein specified in terms of various security policies. For the analysis, this opens up two possibilities: building generic, policy independent and building specific, policy dependent IFAs. While the former needs to track all dependencies between program entities, the latter allows for a reduced and thus more efficient analysis. In this paper, we start out by formally defining a policy independent information flow analysis. Next, we show how to specialize this IFA via policy specific variable tracking, and prove soundness of the specialization. We furthermore investigate refinement relationships between policies, allowing an IFA for one policy to be employed for its refinements. As policy refinement depends on concrete program entities, we additionally propose a precomputation of policy refinement conditions, enabling an efficient refinement check for concrete programs.

Proof witnesses are proof artifacts showing correctness of programs wrt. safety properties. The recent past has seen a rising interest in witnesses as (a) proofs in a proof-carrying-code context, (b) certificates for the correct functioning of verification tools, or simply (c) exchange formats for (partial) verification results. As witnesses in all theses scenarios need to be stored and processed, witnesses are required to be as small as possible. However, software verification tools – the prime suppliers of witnesses – do not necessarily construct small witnesses. In this paper, we present a formal account of proof witnesses. We introduce the concept of weakenings, reducing the complexity of proof witnesses while preserving the ability of witnessing safety. We develop aweakening technique for a specific class of program analyses, and prove it to be sound. Finally, we experimentally demonstrate our weakening technique to indeed achieve a size reduction of proof witnesses.

Today, software verification tools have reached the maturity to be used for large scale programs. Different tools perform differently well on varying code. A software developer is hence faced with the problem of choosing a tool appropriate for her program at hand. A ranking of tools on programs could facilitate the choice. Such rankings can, however, so far only be obtained by running all considered tools on the program.In this paper, we present a machine learning approach to predicting rankings of tools on programs. The method builds upon so-called label ranking algorithms, which we complement with appropriate kernels providing a similarity measure for programs. Our kernels employ a graph representation for software source code that mixes elements of control flow and program dependence graphs with abstract syntax trees. Using data sets from the software verification competition SV-COMP, we demonstrate our rank prediction technique to generalize well and achieve a rather high predictive accuracy (rank correlation > 0.6).

Error detection, localization and correction are time-intensive tasks in software development, but crucial to deliver functionally correct products. Thus, automated approaches to these tasks have been intensively studied for standard software systems. For model-based software systems, the situation is different. While error detection is still well-studied, error localization and correction is a less-studied domain. In this paper, we examine error localization and correction for models of service compositions. Based on formal definitions of error and correction in this context, we show that the classical approach of error localization and correction, i.e. first determining a set of suspicious statements and then proposing changes to these statements, is ineffective in our context. In fact, it lessens the chance to succeed in finding a correction at all.In this paper, we introduce correction proposal as a novel approach on error correction in service compositions integrating error localization and correction in one combined step. In addition, we provide an algorithm to compute such correction proposals automatically.

Information flow analysis studies the flow of data between program entities (e.g. variables), where the allowed flow is specified via security policies. Typical information flow analyses compute a conservative (over-)approximation of the flows in a program. Such an analysis may thus signal non-existing violations of the security policy.In this paper, we propose a new technique for inspecting the reported violations (counterexamples) for spuriousity. Similar to counterexample-guided-abstraction-refinement (CEGAR) in software verification, we use the result of this inspection to improve the next round of the analysis. We prove soundness of this scheme.

In modern software development, paradigms like component-based software engineering (CBSE) and service-oriented architectures (SOA) emphasize the construction of large software systems out of existing components or services. Therein, a service is a self-contained piece of software, which adheres to a specified interface. In a model-based software design, this interface constitutes our sole knowledge of the service at design time, while service implementations are not available. Therefore, correctness checks or detection of potential errors in service compositions has to be carried out without the possibility of executing services. This challenges the usage of standard software error localization techniques for service compositions. In this paper, we review state-of-the-art approaches for error localization of software and discuss their applicability to service compositions.

Today, software verification is an established analysis method which can provide high guarantees for software safety. However, the resources (time and/or memory) for an exhaustive verification are not always available, and analysis then has to resort to other techniques, like testing. Most often, the already achieved partial verification results arediscarded in this case, and testing has to start from scratch.In this paper, we propose a method for combining verification and testing in which testing only needs to check the residual fraction of an uncompleted verification. To this end, the partial results of a verification run are used to construct a residual program (and residual assertions to be checked on it). The residual program can afterwards be fed into standardtesting tools. The proposed technique is sound modulo the soundness of the testing procedure. Experimental results show that this combinedusage of verification and testing can significantly reduce the effort for the subsequent testing.

Programs from Proofs" is a generic method which generates new programs out of correctness proofs of given programs. The technique ensures that the new and given program are behaviorally equivalent and that the new program is easily verifiable, thus serving as an alternative to proof-carrying code concepts. So far, this generic method has one instantiation that verifies type-state properties of programs. In this paper, we present a whole range of new instantiations, all based on data ow analyses. More precisely, we show how an imprecise but fast data ow analysis can be enhanced with a predicate analysis as to yield a precise but expensive analysis. Out of the safety proofs of this analysis, we generate new programs, again behaviorally equivalent to the given ones, which are easily verifiable" in the sense that now the data ow analysis alone can yield precise results. An experimental evaluation practically supports our claim of easy verification.

Verification of hardware and software usually proceeds separately, software analysis relying on the correctness of processors executing instructions. This assumption is valid as long as the software runs on standard CPUs that have been extensively validated and are in wide use. However, for processors exploiting custom instruction set extensions to meet performance and energy constraints the validation might be less extensive, challenging the correctness assumption.In this paper we present an approach for integrating software analyses with hardware verification, specifically targeting custom instruction set extensions. We propose three different techniques for deriving the properties to be proven for the hardware implementation of a custom instruction in order to support software analyses. The techniques are designed to explore the trade-off between generality and efficiency and span from proving functional equivalence over checking the rules of a particular analysis domain to verifying actual pre and post conditions resulting from program analysis. We demonstrate and compare the three techniques on example programs with custom instructions, using stateof-the-art software and hardware verification techniques.

Model transformation is a key concept in modeldrivensoftware engineering. The definition of model transformationsis usually based on meta-models describing the abstractsyntax of languages. While meta-models are thereby able to abstractfrom superfluous details of concrete syntax, they often loosestructural information inherent in languages, like information onmodel elements always occurring together in particular shapes.As a consequence, model transformations cannot naturally re-uselanguage structures, thus leading to unnecessary complexity intheir development as well as analysis.In this paper, we propose a new approach to model transformationdevelopment which allows to simplify and improve thequality of the developed transformations via the exploitation ofthe languages’ structures. The approach is based on context-freegrammars and transformations defined by pairing productions ofsource and target grammars. We show that such transformationsexhibit three important characteristics: they are sound, completeand deterministic.

Configurable program analysis (CPA) is a generic concept for the formalization of different software analysis techniques in a single framework. With the tool CPAchecker, this framework allows for an easy configuration and subsequent automatic execution of analysis procedures ranging from data-flow analysis to model checking. The focus of the tool CPAchecker is thus on analysis. In this paper, we study configurability from the point of view of software certification. Certification aims at providing (via a prior analysis) a certificate of correctness for a program which is (a) tamper-proof and (b) more efficient to check for validity than a full analysis. Here, we will show how, given an analysis instance of a CPA, to construct a corresponding sound certification instance, thereby arriving at configurable program certification. We report on experiments with certification based on different analysis techniques, and in particular explain which characteristics of an underlying analysis allow us to design an efficient (in the above (b) sense) certification procedure.

Today, service compositions often need to be assembled or changed on-the-fly, which leaves only little time for quality assurance. Moreover, quality assurance is complicated by service providers only giving information on their services in terms of domain specific concepts with only limited semantic meaning. In this paper, we propose a method to construct service compositions based on pre-verifiedtemplates. Templates, given as workflow descriptions, are typed over a (domain-independent) template ontology defining concepts and predicates. Templates are proven correct using an abstract semantics, leaving the specific meaning of ontology concepts open, however, only up to given ontology rules. Construction of service compositions amounts to instantiation of templates with domain-specific services.Correctness of an instantiation can then simply be checked by verifying that the domain ontology(a) adheres to the rules of the template ontology, and (b) fulfills the constraints of the employed template.

In the Semantic (Web) Services area, services are considered black boxes with a semantic description of their interfaces as to allow for precise service selection and configuration. The semantic description is usually grounded on domain-specific concepts as modeled in ontologies. This accounts for types used in service signatures, but also predicates occurring in preconditions and effects of services. Ontologies, in particular those enhanced with rules, capture the knowledge of domain experts on properties of and relations between domain concepts. In this paper, we present a verification technique for service compositions which makes use of this domain knowledge. We consider a service composition to be an assembly of services of which we just know signatures, preconditions, and effects. We aim at proving that a composition satisfies a (user-defined) requirement, specified in terms of guaranteed preconditions and required postconditions. As an underlying verification engine we use an SMT solver. To take advantage of the domain knowledge (and often, to enable verification at all), the knowledge is fed into the solver in the form of sorts, uninterpreted functions and in particular assertions as to enhance the solver’s reasoning capabilities. Thereby, we allow for deductions within a domain previously unknown to the solver. We exemplify our technique on a case study from the area of water network optimization software.

Proof-carrying code approaches aim at safe execution of untrusted code by having the code producer attach a safety proof to the code which the code consumer only has to validate. Depending on the type of safety property, proofs can however become quite large and their validation - though faster than their construction - still time consuming. In this paper we introduce a new concept for safe execution of untrusted code. It keeps the idea of putting the time consuming part of proving on the side of the code producer, however, attaches no proofs to code anymore but instead uses the proof to transform the program into an equivalent but more efficiently verifiable program. Code consumers thus still do proving themselves, however, on a computationally inexpensive level only. Experimental results show that the proof effort can be reduced by several orders of magnitude, both with respect to time and space.

Runtime monitoring aims at ensuring program safety by monitoring the program's behaviour during execution and taking appropriate action before a program violates some property.Runtime monitoring is in particular important when an exhaustive formal verification fails. While the approach allows for a safe execution of programs, it may impose a significant runtime overhead.In this paper, we propose a novel technique combining verification and monitoring which incurs no overhead during runtime at all. The technique proceeds by using the inconclusive result of a verification run as the basis for transforming the program into one where all potential points of failure are replaced by HALT statements. The new program is safe by construction, behaviourally equivalent to the original program (except for unsafe behaviour),and has the same performance characteristics.

Predicate abstraction is an established technique for reducing the size of the state space during verification. In this paper, we extend predication abstraction with block-abstraction memoization (BAM), which exploits the fact that blocks are often executed several times in a program. The verification can thus benefit from caching the values of previous block analyses and reusing them upon next entry into a block. In addition to function bodies, BAM also performs well for nested loops. To further increase effectiveness, block memoization has been integrated with lazy abstraction adopting a lazy strategy for cache refinement. Together, this achieves significant performance increases: our tool (an implementation within the configurable program analysis framework CPAchecker) has won the Competition on Software Verification 2012 in the category “Overall”.

Predicate abstraction is an established technique in software verification. It inherently includes an abstraction refinement loop successively adding predicates until the right level of abstraction is found. For concurrent systems, predicate abstraction can be combined with spotlight abstraction, further reducing the state space by abstracting away certain processes. Refinement then has to decide whether to add a new predicate or a new process. Selecting the right predicates and processes is a crucial task: The positive effect of abstraction may be compromised by unfavourable refinement decisions. Here we present a heuristic approach to abstraction refinement. The basis for a decision is a set of refinement candidates, derived by multiple counterexample-generation. Candidates are evaluated with respect to their influence on other components in the system. Experimental results show that our technique can significantly speed up verification as compared to a naive abstraction refinement.

In model-driven development of multi-layer systems (e.g. application, platform and infrastructure), each layer is usually described by separate models. When generating analysis models or code, these separate models rst of all need to be linked. Hence, existing model transformations for single layers cannot be simply re-used. In this paper, we present a modular approach to the transformation of multi-layer systems. It employs model weaving to dene the interconnections between models of dierent layers. The weaving models themselves are subject to model transformations: The result of transforming a weaving model constitutes a conguration for the models obtained by transforming single layers, thereby allowing for a re-use of existing model transformations. We exemplify our approach by the generation of analysis models for component-based software.