Software Verification Methods Research Articles

A Software Verification Method for the Internet of Things and Cyber-Physical Systems

With the proliferation of the Internet of Things devices and cyber-physical systems, there is a growing demand for highly functional and high-quality software. To address this demand, it is crucial to employ effective software verification methods. The proposed method is based on the use of physical quantities defined by the International System of Units, which have specific physical dimensions. Additionally, a transformation of the physical value orientation introduced by Siano is utilized. To evaluate the effectiveness of this method, specialized software defect models have been developed. These models are based on the statistical characteristics of the open-source C/C++ code used in drone applications. The advantages of the proposed method include early detection of software defects during compile-time, reduced testing duration, cost savings by identifying a significant portion of latent defects, improved software quality by enhancing reliability, robustness, and performance, as well as complementing existing verification techniques by focusing on latent defects based on software characteristics. By implementing this method, significant reductions in testing time and improvements in both reliability and software quality can be achieved. The method aims to detect 90% of incorrect uses of software variables and over 50% of incorrect uses of operations at both compile-time and run-time.

An initial study of quality assurance techniques for automated water level control systems

This study aims to formulate requirements for models and programs of cyber-physical systems through an investigation of existing approaches to dynamic verification of control programs. Building on this research, we propose a formal model for dynamic verification of process-oriented control programs in cyber-physical systems. Additionally, our goal is to develop a software package based on the proposed methods and models. The research focuses on hyperprocesses, which involve multiple interacting processes with executable states. The complexity of the models being created and the prevalence of routine operations present challenges in applying formal methods to their verification. Neglecting the verification of process-oriented software poses significant risks in system development. Therefore, addressing this challenge involves research and development of dynamic software verification methods that combine testing and simulation techniques.

СИНТЕЗ ПРОГРАММНОГО И ИНФОРМАЦИОННОГО ОБЕСПЕЧЕНИЯ РЕАЛИЗАЦИИ МЕТОДОВ ВЕРИФИКАЦИИ СОСТОЯНИЯ МЕДИЦИНСКИХ БИОЛОГИЧЕСКИХ ОБЪЕКТОВ ДЛЯ МЕДИЦИНСКОЙ АВТОМАТИЗИРОВАННОЙ ИНФОРМАЦИОННОЙ СИСТЕМЫ

This article describes the information and software for the implementation of various methodsfor verifying the state of fragments of biological objects using computed tomographic images by thedecision support subsystem for the diagnosis of diseases. It is pointed out the current state of developmentof medical diagnostic equipment, the equipment of which medical institutions of the countryand its non-operational accessibility to the population contributed to and led to the emergence andactive development of new directions in the field of radiation diagnostics, which include: digital andfilm radiography, computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging. The article focuses on theanalysis of X-ray images, decision-making based on the analysis of these images, diagnosis based onthe decisions made. The advantages and disadvantages of radiography as a modern diagnostic methodare analyzed relative to their analogues. An important task in the analysis of radiographic imagesof medical biological objects and their fragments is to solve the problem of image quality improvement.In order to improve the quality of X-ray images and increase their informativeness, an algorithmhas been developed and the software of the software subsystem of the medical automated informationsystem for their correction and analysis has been implemented. The article discusses theimplementation of solving problems of diagnosis of diseases, such as: analysis of radiographic images,decision-making based on the analysis of these images, diagnosis based on the decisions made bydeveloping and applying software and information support for the implementation of methods forverifying the state of fragments of biological objects as effective methods for diagnosing the state ofparanasal sinuses by their radiographic and computed tomographic images. The main methods underlyingverification by X-ray and computed tomography images are described. A detailed analysisof the implementation of mathematical models of diagnostic methods in the form of algorithms implementedby software for the functioning of the decision support subsystem of a medical automatedinformation system is given. Examples of practical implementation of software and information supportfor verification methods of medical objects in the form of screen forms for working with fragmentsof the object under study and the results of the analysis of radiographic images are shown.This makes it possible to increase the efficiency, accuracy of verification of the state of medical biologicalobjects, the reliability of the disease diagnosis process. The scientific novelty, the results ofthe approbation of the material presented in the article at international, All-Russian conferences,scientific journals are shown.

Use and usability of software verification methods to detect behaviour interference when teaching an assistive home companion robot: A proof-of-concept study

Abstract When studying the use of assistive robots in home environments, and especially how such robots can be personalised to meet the needs of the resident, key concerns are issues related to behaviour verification, behaviour interference and safety. Here, personalisation refers to the teaching of new robot behaviours by both technical and non-technical end users. In this article, we consider the issue of behaviour interference caused by situations where newly taught robot behaviours may affect or be affected by existing behaviours and thus, those behaviours will not or might not ever be executed. We focus in particular on how such situations can be detected and presented to the user. We describe the human–robot behaviour teaching system that we developed as well as the formal behaviour checking methods used. The online use of behaviour checking is demonstrated, based on static analysis of behaviours during the operation of the robot, and evaluated in a user study. We conducted a proof-of-concept human–robot interaction study with an autonomous, multi-purpose robot operating within a smart home environment. Twenty participants individually taught the robot behaviours according to instructions they were given, some of which caused interference with other behaviours. A mechanism for detecting behaviour interference provided feedback to participants and suggestions on how to resolve those conflicts. We assessed the participants’ views on detected interference as reported by the behaviour teaching system. Results indicate that interference warnings given to participants during teaching provoked an understanding of the issue. We did not find a significant influence of participants’ technical background. These results highlight a promising path towards verification and validation of assistive home companion robots that allow end-user personalisation.

Dedicative Verification of Reflex Programs

This paper presents a new two-step verification method for control software. The novelty of the method is that it reduces the verification of the temporal properties of a control program to the deductive verification of an imperative program in the Hoare style, which explicitly models the time and history of the control program. The method is applied to programs written in the Reflex language, a domain-specific extension of C developed as an alternative to the languages of the IEC 61131-3 standard. Reflex is a process-oriented language that describes control programs in terms of communicating processes controlled by operator events, including the events generated by operations on discrete time intervals. At the first step, an annotated Reflex program is translated into an equivalent annotated imperative program on a bounded subset of C, which is extended with the logical type bool, supertype value (which combines the values that can return Reflex functions and operators), and statement havoc x (which assigns an arbitrary value to the variable x). At the second step, the resulting imperative program undergoes deductive verification. The proposed method is illustrated by the example of deductive verification of a Reflex program that controls a hand dryer. The example includes the original Reflex program, a set of requirements, the resulting annotated program, the correctness conditions generated, and results of verifying these conditions in Z3py, an interface to the Z3 SMT solver implemented in Python.

Оцінка програмного забезпечення систем залізничного транспорту станційного рівня на відповідність вимогам українських стандартів

The purpose of this article is to find effective methods for assessing and proving the functional safety of software at the station level railway control systems. Adaptation of experience and development of a common approach to the software verification process. Method. To achieve this purpose the analysis of current regulatory documents was conducted. An adaptation of the existing experience in performing the conformity assessment of information and control systems important for the safety of nuclear power plants was carried out. All this allowed to determine the general requirements and methods of evaluation of software for various purpose. Results. Based on the results of the analysis of the current normative documents, the procedure for evaluating the software of systems of various purposes has been implemented in the TCC of LTD RPI HARTRON-ARKOS. Scientific novelty. This article formulates proposals for the extension of the standards of DSTU 4178 in the part of the assessment and proof of functional safety of software at the station level railway control systems. At the same time, the general requirements and methods of evaluation of software for different purposes, given in the current standards, were taken into account. Practical importance. The proposed approach of railway system software evaluation greatly extends the requirements of DSTU 4178 and facilitates the development and implementation of new, more effective software verification methods.

Verification of dynamic memory allocators based on symbolic program execution

Subject of Research. The paper presents the study of vulnerability exploitation techniques in the implementation of dynamic memory allocation algorithms (glibc library allocator): Poisoned Null-byte, Overlapped Chunks, Fastbin Attack,Unsafe Unlink, House of Einherjar, House of Force, House of Spirit, House of Lore, Unsorted Bin Attack. Examples of vulnerability exploitation code and classification of the presented techniques are given in accordance with the Common Weakness Enumeration list. The modern methods and means of vulnerabilities detection are studied; their advantages and disadvantages are shown using the Heap Hopper framework as an example. Modern methods of appropriate software verification are considered. Method. The proposed software verification method combines the approaches of static analysis and symbolic execution using an accurate model of algorithms for dynamic memory allocation. In the compilation process of program being tested, the Kripke structure is created. Dynamic memory vulnerabilities are described by temporal logic formulas. The resulting structure and formulas are passed at the input of the model checking algorithm. Concrete-symbolic execution of the assembled binary file is performed. Vulnerability conditions expressed in the form of propositional logic formulas are checked for symbolic execution paths. Main Results. The practical use of the proposed approach to detection of dynamic memory vulnerabilities in software applications is shown. Symbolic execution is implemented in the form of a low-level debugger, which reduces the operating time of algorithms due to the execution of the application being tested on a real processor. Practical Relevance. The paper presents an integrated approach for solving the problem of automatic vulnerabilities detecting at different stages of the software development life cycle. This approach is applicable for verification of the similar implementations of dynamic memory allocators, such as ptmalloc, dlmalloc, tcmalloc, jemalloc and musl.

Research of software verification methods for waste management and review the waste treatment legislation in Russia

The article considers the possibility of working with natural and technical systems of the Leningrad region in terms of processing several main types of waste. In article is collection some interesting program product software for waste management. In the process of analyzing the situation with waste management and the involvement of Russian citizens in the methodology of separate collection, the importance of modern software products installed on personal computers and gadgets was emphasized it is the constant interaction with such software products that adapts the methodology of separate collection, allows Russian citizens to learn more about methods of waste treatment, taking care of the environment. In addition, the task was set to create a perfect software product that takes into account the advantages of all previously created software products for recycling waste in the Java Script environment. The author emphasizes the possibility of developing a series of software products for waste management and developing waste management competencies in St. Petersburg residents. It is also worth noting that the created program described in the article is currently being developed in the third version, taking into account more and more information sources on waste processing. It should be noted that the described product contains several built-in hyperlinks to the most significant freely installed products for environmental monitoring. The article contains a separate chapter on the development of legislation in the field of waste management in the Russian Federation in order to reduce spontaneous dumps, and the organization of modernized state-owned enterprises regional operators for waste processing, creating a comfortable economic environment for recycling, rather than storing waste. In the last task, the ECO-365 software product may also be useful for better ecology in all peace.

RINGA: Design and verification of finite state machine for self-adaptive software at runtime

ContextIn recent years, software environments such as the cloud and Internet of Things (IoT) have become increasingly sophisticated, and as a result, development of adaptable software has become very important. Self-adaptive software is appropriate for today's needs because it changes its behavior or structure in response to a changing environment at runtime. To adapt to changing environments, runtime verification is an important requirement, and research that integrates traditional verification with self-adaptive software is in high demand. ObjectiveModel checking is an effective static verification method for software, but existing problems at runtime remain unresolved. In this paper, we propose a self-adaptive software framework that applies model checking to software to enable verification at runtime. MethodThe proposed framework consists of two parts: the design of self-adaptive software using a finite state machine and the adaptation of the software during runtime. For the first part, we propose two finite state machines for self-adaptive software called the self-adaptive finite state machine (SA-FSM) and abstracted finite state machine (A-FSM). For the runtime verification part, a self-adaptation process based on a MAPE (monitoring, analyzing, planning, and executing) loop is implemented. ResultsWe performed an empirical evaluation with several model-checking tools (i.e., NuSMV and CadenceSMV), and the results show that the proposed method is more efficient at runtime. We also investigated a simple example application in six scenarios related to the IoT environment. We implemented Android and Arduino applications, and the results show the practical usability of the proposed self-adaptive framework at runtime. ConclusionsWe proposed a framework for integrating model checking with a self-adaptive software lifecycle. The results of our experiments showed that the proposed framework can achieve verify self-adaptation software at runtime.

Low-Cost Dynamic Constraint Checking for the JVM

Abstract Using formal methods for software verification slowly becomes a standard in the industry. Overall it is a good idea to integrate as many checks as possible with the programming language. This is a major cause of the apparent success of strong typing in software, either performed on the compile time or dynamically, on runtime. Unfortunately, only some of the properties of software may be expressed in the type system of event the most sophisticated programming languages. Many of them must be performed dynamically. This paper presents a flexible library for the dynamically typed, functional programming language running in the JVM environment. This library offers its users a close to zero run-time overhead and strong mathematical background in category theory.

A Latent Implementation Error Detection Method for Software Validation

Model checking and conformance testing play an important role in software system design and implementation. From the view of integrating model checking and conformance testing into a tightly coupled validation approach, this paper presents a novel approach to detect latent errors in software implementation. The latent errors can be classified into two kinds, one is called as Unnecessary Implementation Trace, and the other is called as Neglected Implementation Trace. The method complements the incompleteness of security properties for software model checking. More accurate models are characterized to leverage the effectiveness of the model-based software verification and testing combined method.

Верификация драйверов операционной системы Linux

Linux driver verification is a large application area for software verification methods, in particular, for functional, safety, and security verification. Linux driver software is industrial production code — IT infrastructures rely on its stability, and thus, there are strong requirements for correctness and reliability. Linux driver software is complex, low-level systems code, and its characteristics make it necessary to bring to bear techniques from program analysis, SMT solvers, model checking, and other areas of software verification. These areas have recently made a significant progress in terms of precision and performance, and the complex task of verifying Linux driver software can be successful if the conceptual state-of-the-art becomes available in tool implementations. The paper is based on experience of the research groups led by authors in verification of industrial software. It is important to develop verification tools that are efficient and effective enough to successfully check software components that are as complex as device drivers. In this area verifiers/researchers and Linux society find mutual benefits in cooperation because: for the society it is important to get such crucial software verified; for the verification community it is important to get realistic verification tasks in order to tune and further develop the technology. The paper provides an overview of the state-of-the-art and pointed out research directions in which further progress is essential. In particularly the paper considers most promising verification techniques and tools, including predicate abstraction, counter example generation, explicit-state verification, termination and concurrency analysis. One of main topic of Linux driver verification research is combination of verification techniques.

Project experience with IEC 61508 and its consequences

The paper reports on the experiences with implementation of IEC 61508 in recent projects with European, North American and Japanese system vendors. The paper describes problems identified in implementing the standard and proposes a knowledge tool and a combination of software verification methods to mitigate these issues.

An automated verification method for distributed systems software based on model extraction

Software verification methods are used only sparingly in industrial software development today. The most successful methods are based on the use of model checking. There are, however, many hurdles to overcome before the use of model checking tools can truly become mainstream. To use a model checker, the user must first define a formal model of the application, and to do so requires specialized knowledge of both the application and of model checking techniques. For larger applications, the effort to manually construct a formal model can take a considerable investment of time and expertise, which can rarely be afforded. Worse, it is hard to secure that a manually constructed model can keep pace with the typical software application, as it evolves from the concept stage to the product stage. We describe a verification method that requires far less specialized knowledge in model construction. It allows us to extract models mechanically from source code. The model construction process now becomes easily repeatable, as the application itself continues to evolve. Once the model is constructed, existing model checking techniques allow us to perform all checks in a mechanical fashion, achieving nearly complete automation. The level of thoroughness that can be achieved with this new type of software testing is significantly greater than for conventional techniques. We report on the application of this method in the verification of the call processing software for a new telephone switch that was developed at Lucent Technologies.

Multi-agent object level AI validation and verification

A Methodology for validation and verification of AI systems in aerospace is presented. The approach is applicable to both systems that are already coded and to those that are to be designed. Design methods are proposed that can be applied to (reverse projected from) AI systems that are designed in the field and already coded. We note that there are well-developed software validation and verification methods that can be applied to the AI systems if an appropriate methodology is applied for validation of AI systems. Thus rather than reinventing methods for AI validation, we only invent methods to allow us to reduce to known problems in software validation and verification methodologies.

A Concept of a Computer System for the Execution of Safety Critical Licensable Software Programmed in a High Level Language

There are already a number of established methods and guidelines, which have proven their usefulness for the development of high integrity software employed for the control of safety critical technical processes. Prior to its application, such software is still subjected to appropriate measures for its verification and validation. However, according to the present state of the art, these measures cannot guarantee the correctness of larger programs with mathematical rigour. Therefore, the licencing authorities do not approve safety relevant systems yet, whose behaviour is exclusively program controlled. In order to provide a remedy for this unsatisfactory situation, the concept of a special computer system is developed, which can carry out safety related functions within the framework of distributed process control systems or programmable logic controllers. It explicitly supports sequence controls, since many automation programs including safety relevant tasks are of that kind. The architecture features full temporal predictability, determinism, and supervision of the program execution and of all other activities of the computer system and supports the software verification method of diverse inverse documentation. The system can be programmed in a high level language and is based on a library of function modules, whose correctness can be mathematically proved. The concept utilises an operating system and a compiler only in a very rudimentary form. Hence, it enables the safety licencing of the software running on the computer system. In the microprogram of this computer, which may be based on the VIPER chip, a minimum operating system is provided, whose only task is to start the execution of runnable subroutines, which are marked in a ready list. As the elementary units of application programming, the set of basic function modules is provided in RaMs. These modules are of application specific nature and generally different for each application area. For the formulation of safety related automation programs these basic functions are only interconnected with each other. The prototype of a tool has been developed allowing to carry through this kind of programming in graphical form.

Exception Handling and Software Fault Tolerance

Some basic concepts underlying the issue of fault-tolerant software design are investigated. Relying on these concepts, a unified point of view on programmed exception handling and default exception handling based on automatic backward recovery is constructed. The cause–effect relationship between software design faults and failure occurrences is explored and a class of faults for which default exception handling can provide effective fault tolerance is characterized. It is also shown that there exists a second class of design faults which cannot be tolerated by using default exception handling. The role that software verification methods can play in avoiding the production of such faults is discussed.