Lightweight Formal Methods for the Development of High-Assurance Networking Systems

We survey several of the research efforts pursued by the iBench and snBench projects in the CS Department at Boston University over the last half dozen years. These activities use ideas and methodologies inspired by recent developments in other parts of computer science -- particularly in formal methods and in the foundations of programming languages -- but now specifically applied to the certification of safety-critical networking systems. This is research jointly led by Azer Bestavros and Assaf Kfoury with the participation of Adam Bradley, Andrei Lapets, and Michael Ocean.

Safe Compositional Specification of Networking Systems: TRAFFIC The Language and Its Type Checking

This paper formally defines the operational semantic for TRAFFIC, a specification language for flow composition applications proposed in BUCS-TR-2005-014, and presents a type system based on desired safety assurance. We provide proofs on reduction (weak-confluence, strong-normalization and unique normal form), on soundness and completeness of type system with respect to reduction, and on equivalence classes of flow specifications. Finally, we provide a pseudo-code listing of a syntax-directed type checking algorithm implementing rules of the type system capable of inferring the type of a closed flow specification.