David Mentré from Mitsubishi Electric R&D Centre Europe has produced a very interesting report on his use of GNATprove (the formal verification tool we develop for the next version of SPARK) on a case-study from the Open-ETCS European project, to develop the tools for the future European Train Control Systems.
Although David asked me to [...]
In formal verification, we ultimately rely on automatic provers to decide whether formulas are valid (always true) or not. In GNATprove for example, we rely mostly on the ability of prover Alt-Ergo to analyze quickly the formulas we generate, and answer yes when the formula is valid or no when the formula is invalid (so [...]
The Merriam-Webster dictionnary defines an assumption as “a fact or statement (as a proposition, axiom, postulate, or notion) taken for granted”. This is indeed the role that assumptions play in formal verification of programs, as performed in Frama-C platform or GNATprove. Assumptions may either be related to the proof of a single function (like “this [...]
At the SPARK User Day yesterday in Bath, Altran-Praxis and AdaCore announced that the SPARK language will undergo a major transformation, to both extend the subset of Ada included in SPARK, and to use the new specification features of Ada 2012 instead of special comments like in today’s SPARK language. This is only fair that, [...]
A recently published paper by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), examines software assurance tools as a fundamental resource to improve quality in today’s software applications. It looks at the behavior of one class of software assurance tool: the source code security analyzer. Because many software security weaknesses are introduced at the implementation [...]
The recently launched project Hi-Lite is based on powerful industrial tools that have been developed by the different partners for the last 10 to 25 years. This means in particular that it is not obvious to grasp the “vision” of Hi-Lite without knowing how all these tools work. To share this vision as broadly as [...]