Verification and validation

Verification and validation (also abbreviated as V&V) are independent procedures that are used together for checking that a product, service, or system meets requirements and specifications and that it fulfills its intended purpose. These are critical components of a quality management system such as ISO 9000. The words "verification" and "validation" are sometimes preceded with "independent", indicating that the verification and validation is to be performed by a disinterested third party. "Integration verification and validation" can be abbreviated as "IV&V". In practice, as quality management terms, the definitions of verification and validation can be inconsistent. Sometimes they are even used interchangeably. However, the PMBOK guide, a standard adopted by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), defines them as follows in its 4th edition:

"Validation. The assurance that a product, service, or system meets the needs of the customer and other identified st

Scaling Language Features for Program Verification

Georg Stefan Schmid

Formal verification of real-world software systems remains challenging for a number of reasons, including lack of automation, friction in specifying properties, and limited support for the diverse programming paradigms used in industry. In this thesis we make progress towards a better verification experience in general-purpose programming languages by contributing improvements both to the automated checking and the specification of safety properties in languages combining functional and imperative features. We present our extensions in two parts -- reasoning about shared mutable data, and types as specifications -- both of which ultimately rely on reductions of expressive surface languages to a functional core. Throughout, we instantiate our techniques for the particular example of Scala, a mixed-paradigm language widely-used in industry.The first part shows how to extend a verifier for higher-order functions and immutable data to support imperative programs with shared mutable data. We build upon Stainless, a contract-based verification system that relies on SMT solvers to automatically verify a large fragment of Scala. Our technique extends Stainless to check general heap-manipulating programs against modular specifications in the style of dynamic frames. A novelty of our approach is the translation of imperative function contracts that encodes frame conditions using quantifier-free formulas in first-order logic, instead of relying on quantifiers or on dedicated separation logic reasoning. Our quantifier-free encoding enables SMT solvers to both prove safety and to report counterexamples relative to the semantics of procedure contracts.In the second part we turn to types and type-level programming as an alternative means of specifying correctness properties. While dependent types have been studied extensively for purely-functional languages, we investigate their applications to languages with subtyping and (abstractions of) imperative features. We first study a calculus that provides type-level computation through singleton types and allows abstraction of state and IO through a non-deterministic choice operator. This allows for modelling interactions with existing imprecisely-typed and impure code. Our calculus is formalized and mechanically proven correct using the Coq proof assistant. In addition, we develop a prototypical implementation in the Scala compiler and study typical type-level programming use cases in the Scala ecosystem.

EPFL2022

Imprecise Security: Quality and Complexity Tradeoffs for Hardware Information Flow Tracking

Andrew James Becker, Wei Hu, Paolo Ienne, Ryan Charles Kastner

Secure hardware design is a challenging task that goes far beyond ensuring functional correctness. Important design properties such as non-interference cannot be verified on functional circuit models due to the lack of essential information (e.g., sensitivity level) for reasoning about security. Hardware information flow tracking (IFT) techniques associate data objects in the hardware design with sensitivity labels for modeling security-related behaviors. They allow the designer to test and verify security properties related to confidentiality, integrity, and logical side channels. However, precisely accounting for each bit of information flow at the hardware level can be expensive. In this work, we focus on the precision of the IFT logic. The key idea is to selectively introduce only one sided errors ( false positives); these provide a conservative and safe information flow response while reducing the complexity of the security logic. We investigate the effect of logic synthesis on the quality and complexity of hardware IFT and reveal how different logic synthesis optimizations affect the amount of false positives and design overheads of IFT logic. We propose novel techniques to further simplify the IFT logic while adding no, or only a minimum number of, false positives. Additionally, we provide a solution to quantitatively introduce false positives in order to accelerate information flow security verification. Experimental results using IWLS benchmarks show that our method can reduce complexity of GLIFT by 14.47% while adding 0.20% of false positives on average. By quantitatively introducing false positives, we can achieve up to a 55.72% speedup in verification time.

Assoc Computing Machinery2016

Scaling Language Features for Program Verification

Georg Stefan Schmid

EPFL2022

Développement et validation de l'extraction in situ d'éthanol sur culture mixte à partir de perméat de petit-lait

Scaling Language Features for Program Verification

Imprecise Security: Quality and Complexity Tradeoffs for Hardware Information Flow Tracking

Imprecise Security: Quality and Complexity Tradeoffs for Hardware Information Flow Tracking

Développement et validation de l'extraction in situ d'éthanol sur culture mixte à partir de perméat de petit-lait

Scaling Language Features for Program Verification