The Verification Challenge

This book presents reflections on the occasion of 20 years on the KeY project that focuses on deductive software verification. Since the inception of the KeY project two decades ago, the area of deductive verification has evolved considerably. Support for real world programming languages by deductive program verification tools has become prevalent. This required to overcome significant theoretical and technical challenges to support advanced software engineering and programming concepts. The community became more interconnected with a competitive, but friendly and supportive environment. We took the 20-year anniversary of KeY as an opportunity to invite researchers, inside and outside of the project, to contribute to a book capturing some state-of-the-art developments in the field. We received thirteen contributions from recognized experts of the field addressing the latest challenges. The topics of the contributions range from tool development, effciency and usability considerations to novel specification and verification methods. This book should offer the reader an up-to-date impression of the current state of art in deductive verification, and we hope, inspire her to contribute to the field and to join forces. We are looking forward to meeting you at the next conference, to listen to your research talks and the resulting fruitful discussions and collaborations.

The two-volume set LNCS 9952 and LNCS 9953 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation, ISoLA 2016, held in Imperial, Corfu, Greece, in October 2016. The papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the proceedings. Featuring a track introduction to each section, the papers are organized in topical sections named: statistical model checking; evaluation and reproducibility of program analysis and verification; ModSyn-PP: modular synthesis of programs and processes; semantic heterogeneity in the formal development of complex systems; static and runtime verification: competitors or friends?; rigorous engineering of collective adaptive systems; correctness-by-construction and post-hoc verification: friends or foes?; privacy and security issues in information systems; towards a unified view of modeling and programming; formal methods and safety certification: challenges in the railways domain; RVE: runtime verification and enforcement, the (industrial) application perspective; variability modeling for scalable software evolution; detecting and understanding software doping; learning systems: machine-learning in software products and learning-based analysis of software systems; testing the internet of things; doctoral symposium; industrial track; RERS challenge; and STRESS.

A key strength of this book is that it describes the entire verification cycle and details each stage. The organization of the book follows the cycle, demonstrating how functional verification engages all aspects of the overall design effort and how individual cycle stages relate to the larger design process. Throughout the text, the authors leverage their 35 plus years experience in functional verification, providing examples and case studies, and focusing on the skills, methods, and tools needed to complete each verification task. Additionally, the major vendors (Mentor Graphics, Cadence Design Systems, Verisity, and Synopsys) have implemented key examples from the text and made these available on line, so that the reader can test out the methods described in the text.

As alternatives formal verification techniques have been proposed. Instead of simulating a design the correctness is proven by formal techniques. There are different areas where these approaches can be used: equivalence checking, property checking or symbolic simulation. These methods have been successfully applied in many industrial projects and have become the state-of-the-art technique in several fields. However, the deployment of the existing tools in real-world projects also showed the weaknesses and problems of formal verification techniques. This gave motivating impulses for tool developers and researchers.