A Survey on Formal Languages in the Software Development Life Cycle

Abstract

In software engineering, security has become an important issue to be considered in the software development life cycle. The software engineers need to develop a string method to identify software vulnerabilities and ensuring security functionality. Specification languages are used to verify attacks in the software by detecting the Vulnerabilities points and simulate different types of attacks. In this paper, we did a survey of some of the specification languages, two kinds of specification languages were studied, the formal methods and semi-formal methods; we showed their properties, compare pros and cons for each. A case software secure study was introduced for the authentication schema in the cloud computing system, using two specification languages; UML semi-formal and Z language. Z languages is used help and support the structuring of specifications based on its mathematical notation, while UML provides a standard way to display system more diagrammatically in order to formalize user system requirements. The results of choosing between formal and semi-formal methods showed that formal methods are stronger in behavioral specification; determine object relations and the function representation while semi-formal methods are stronger in the graphical representation of the system. The comparative study of this paper will give the software developer with a guideline which will help on selecting the best specification language.