Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

National Initiatives

ANR CoLiS

Participants : Claude Marché [contact] , Andrei Paskevich.

The CoLiS research project is funded by the programme “Société de l'information et de la communication” of the ANR, for a period of 48 months, starting on October 1st, 2015. http://colis.irif.univ-paris-diderot.fr/

The project aims at developing formal analysis and verification techniques and tools for scripts. These scripts are written in the POSIX or bash shell language. Our objective is to produce, at the end of the project, formal methods and tools allowing to analyze, test, and validate scripts. For this, the project will develop techniques and tools based on deductive verification and tree transducers stemming from the domain of XML documents.

Partners: Université Paris-Diderot, IRIF laboratory (formerly PPS & LIAFA), coordinator ; Inria Lille, team LINKS

ANR Vocal

Participants : Jean-Christophe Filliâtre [contact] , Andrei Paskevich.

The Vocal research project is funded by the programme “Société de l'information et de la communication” of the ANR, for a period of 48 months, starting on October 1st, 2015.

The goal of the Vocal project is to develop the first formally verified library of efficient general-purpose data structures and algorithms. It targets the OCaml programming language, which allows for fairly efficient code and offers a simple programming model that eases reasoning about programs. The library will be readily available to implementers of safety-critical OCaml programs, such as Coq, Astrée, or Frama-C. It will provide the essential building blocks needed to significantly decrease the cost of developing safe software. The project intends to combine the strengths of three verification tools, namely Coq, Why3, and CFML. It will use Coq to obtain a common mathematical foundation for program specifications, as well as to verify purely functional components. It will use Why3 to verify a broad range of imperative programs with a high degree of proof automation. Finally, it will use CFML for formal reasoning about effectful higher-order functions and data structures making use of pointers and sharing.

Partners: team Gallium (Inria Paris-Rocquencourt), team DCS (Verimag), TrustInSoft, and OCamlPro.

ANR Ajacs

Participant : Arthur Charguéraud [contact] .

The AJACS research project is funded by the programme “Société de l'information et de la communication” of the ANR, for a period of 42 months, starting on October 1st, 2014.

The goal of the AJACS project is to provide strong security and privacy guarantees on the client side for web application scripts implemented in JavaScript, the most widely used language for the Web. The proposal is to prove correct analyses for JavaScript programs, in particular information flow analyses that guarantee no secret information is leaked to malicious parties. The definition of sub-languages of JavaScript, with certified compilation techniques targeting them, will allow deriving more precise analyses. Another aspect of the proposal is the design and certification of security and privacy enforcement mechanisms for web applications, including the APIs used to program real-world applications. On the Toccata side, the focus will be on the formalization of secure subsets of JavaScript, and on the mechanization of proofs of translations from high-level languages into JavaScript.

Partners: team Celtique (Inria Rennes - Bretagne Atlantique), team Prosecco (Inria Paris - Rocquencourt), team Indes (Inria Sophia Antipolis - Méditerranée), and Imperial College (London).

ANR FastRelax

Participants : Sylvie Boldo [contact] , Guillaume Melquiond.

This is a research project funded by the programme “Ingénierie Numérique & Sécurité” of the ANR. It is funded for a period of 48 months and it has started on October 1st, 2014. http://fastrelax.gforge.inria.fr/

Our aim is to develop computer-aided proofs of numerical values, with certified and reasonably tight error bounds, without sacrificing efficiency. Applications to zero-finding, numerical quadrature or global optimization can all benefit from using our results as building blocks. We expect our work to initiate a "fast and reliable" trend in the symbolic-numeric community. This will be achieved by developing interactions between our fields, designing and implementing prototype libraries and applying our results to concrete problems originating in optimal control theory.

Partners: team ARIC (Inria Grenoble Rhône-Alpes), team MARELLE (Inria Sophia Antipolis - Méditerranée), team SPECFUN (Inria Saclay - Île-de-France), Université Paris 6, and LAAS (Toulouse).

ANR Soprano

Participants : Sylvain Conchon [contact] , Évelyne Contejean, Guillaume Melquiond.

The Soprano research project is funded by the programme “Sciences et technologies logicielles” of the ANR, for a period of 42 months, starting on October 1st, 2014.

The SOPRANO project aims at preparing the next generation of verification-oriented solvers by gathering experts from academia and industry. We will design a new framework for the cooperation of solvers, focused on model generation and borrowing principles from SMT (current standard) and CP (well-known in optimization). Our main scientific and technical objectives are the following. The first objective is to design a new collaboration framework for solvers, centered around synthesis rather than satisfiability and allowing cooperation beyond that of Nelson-Oppen while still providing minimal interfaces with theoretical guarantees. The second objective is to design new decision procedures for industry-relevant and hard-to-solve theories. The third objective is to implement these results in a new open-source platform. The fourth objective is to ensure industrial-adequacy of the techniques and tools developed through periodical evaluations from the industrial partners.

Partners: team DIVERSE (Inria Rennes - Bretagne Atlantique), Adacore, CEA List, Université Paris-Sud, and OCamlPro.

ANR CAFEIN

Participant : Sylvain Conchon [contact] .

The CAFEIN research project is funded by the programme “Ingénierie Numérique & Sécurité” of the ANR, for a period of 3 years, starting on February 1st, 2013. https://cavale.enseeiht.fr/CAFEIN/ .

This project addresses the formal verification of functional properties at specification level, for safety critical reactive systems. In particular, we focus on command and control systems interacting with a physical environment, specified using the synchronous language Lustre.

A first goal of the project is to improve the level of automation of formal verification, by adapting and combining existing verification techniques such as SMT-based temporal induction, and abstract interpretation for invariant discovery. A second goal is to study how knowledge of the mathematical theory of hybrid command and control systems can help the analysis at the controller's specification level. Third, the project addresses the issue of implementing real valued specifications in Lustre using floating-point arithmetic.

Partners: ONERA, CEA List, ENSTA, teams Maxplus (Inria Saclay - Île-de-France), team Parkas (Inria Paris - Rocquencourt), Perpignan University, Prover Technology, Rockwell Collins.

ANR BWare

Participants : Sylvain Conchon [contact] , Évelyne Contejean, Jean-Christophe Filliâtre, Andrei Paskevich, Claude Marché.

The BWare research project is funded by the programme “Ingénierie Numérique & Sécurité” of the ANR, a period of 4 years, starting on September 1st, 2012. http://bware.lri.fr .

BWare is an industrial research project that aims to provide a mechanized framework to support the automated verification of proof obligations coming from the development of industrial applications using the B method and requiring high guarantee of confidence. The methodology used in this project consists of building a generic platform of verification relying on different theorem provers, such as first-order provers and SMT solvers. The variety of these theorem provers aims at allowing a wide panel of proof obligations to be automatically verified by the platform. The major part of the verification tools used in BWare have already been involved in some experiments, which have consisted in verifying proof obligations or proof rules coming from industrial applications [104] . This therefore should be a driving factor to reduce the risks of the project, which can then focus on the design of several extensions of the verification tools to deal with a larger amount of proof obligations.

The partners are: Cedric laboratory at CNAM (CPR Team, project leader); teams Gallium and Deducteam (Inria Paris - Rocquencourt) ; Mitsubishi Electric R&D Centre Europe, ClearSy (the company which develops and maintains Atelier B), and the start-up OCamlPro.

ANR Verasco

Participants : Guillaume Melquiond [contact] , Sylvie Boldo, Arthur Charguéraud, Claude Marché.

The Versaco research project is funded by the programme “Ingénierie Numérique & Sécurité” of the ANR, for a period of 4 years and a half, starting on January 1st, 2012. Project website: http://verasco.imag.fr .

The main goal of the project is to investigate the formal verification of static analyzers and of compilers, two families of tools that play a crucial role in the development and validation of critical embedded software. More precisely, the project aims at developing a generic static analyzer based on abstract interpretation for the C language, along with a number of advanced abstract domains and domain combination operators, and prove the soundness of this analyzer using the Coq proof assistant. Likewise, the project keeps working on the CompCert C formally-verified compiler, the first realistic C compiler that has been mechanically proved to be free of miscompilation, and carry it to the point where it could be used in the critical software industry.

Partners: teams Gallium and Abstraction (Inria Paris - Rocquencourt), Airbus avionics and simulation (Toulouse), IRISA (Rennes), Verimag (Grenoble).