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Section: Partnerships and Cooperations
National Initiatives
AnaStaSec
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Others partners: Airbus France (France), AMOSSYS (France), CEA LIST (France), Inria Rennes-Bretagne Atlantique (France), TrustInSoft (France)
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See also: http://www.di.ens.fr/ feret/anastasec/
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Abstract: An emerging structure in our information processing-based society is the notion of trusted complex systems interacting via heterogeneous networks with an open, mostly untrusted world. This view characterises a wide variety of systems ranging from the information system of a company to the connected components of a private house, all of which have to be connected with the outside.
It is in particular the case for some aircraft-embedded computer systems, which communicate with the ground through untrusted communication media. Besides, the increasing demand for new capabilities, such as enhanced on-board connectivity, e.g. using mobile devices, together with the need for cost reduction, leads to more integrated and interconnected systems. For instance, modern aircrafts embed a large number of computer systems, from safety-critical cockpit avionics to passenger entertainment. Some systems meet both safety and security requirements. Despite thorough segregation of subsystems and networks, some shared communication resources raise the concern of possible intrusions.
Some techniques have been developed and still need to be investigated to ensure security and confidentiality properties of such systems. Moreover, most of them are model-based techniques operating only at architectural level and provide no guarantee on the actual implementations. However, most security incidents are due to attackers exploiting subtle implementation-level software vulnerabilities. Systems should therefore be analyzed at software level as well (i.e. source or executable code), in order to provide formal assurance that security properties indeed hold for real systems.
Because of the size of such systems, and considering that they are evolving entities, the only economically viable alternative is to perform automatic analyses. Such analyses of security and confidentiality properties have never been achieved on large-scale systems where security properties interact with other software properties, and even the mapping between high-level models of the systems and the large software base implementing them has never been done and represents a great challenge. The goal of this project is to develop the new concepts and technologies necessary to meet such a challenge.
The project AnaStaSec project will allow for the formal verification of security properties of software-intensive embedded systems, using automatic static analysis techniques at different levels of representation: models, source and binary codes. Among expected outcomes of the project will be a set of prototype tools, able to deal with realistic large systems and the elaboration of industrial security evaluation processes, based on static analysis.
REPAS
The project REPAS, Reliable and Privacy-Aware Software Systems via Bisimulation Metrics (coordination Catuscia Palamidessi, Inria Saclay), aims at investigating quantitative notions and tools for proving program correctness and protecting privacy, focusing on bisimulation metrics, the natural extension of bisimulation on quantitative systems. A key application is to develop mechanisms to protect the privacy of users when their location traces are collected. Partners: Inria (Comete, Focus), ENS Cachan, ENS Lyon, University of Bologna.
VerAsCo
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Others partners: Airbus France (France), IRISA (France), Inria Saclay (France)
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See also: http://www.systematic-paris-region.org/fr/projets/verasco
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Abstract: The usefulness of verification tools in the development and certification of critical software is limited by the amount of trust one can have in their results. A first potential issue is unsoundness of a verification tool: if a verification tool fails (by mistake or by design) to account for all possible executions of the program under verification, it can conclude that the program is correct while it actually misbehaves when executed. A second, more insidious, issue is miscompilation: verification tools generally operate at the level of source code or executable model; a bug in the compilers and code generators that produce the executable code that actually runs can lead to a wrong executable being generated from a correct program.
The project VerAsCo advocates a mathematically-grounded solution to the issues of formal verifying compilers and verification tools. We set out to develop 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, we will continue our work on the CompCert C formally-verified compiler, the first realistic C compiler that has been mechanically proved to be free of any miscompilation will be continued. Finally, the tool qualification issues that must be addressed before formally-verified tools can be used in the aircraft industry, will be investigated.
AstréeA
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Title: Static Analysis of Embedded Asynchronous Real-Time Software
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See also: http://www.astreea.ens.fr
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Abstract: The focus of the AstréeA project is on the development of static analysis by abstract interpretation to check the safety of large-scale asynchronous embedded software. During the Thesee ANR project (2006–2010), we developed a concrete and abstract models of the ARINC 653 operating system and its scheduler, and a first analyzer prototype. The gist of the AstréeA project is the continuation of this effort, following the recipe that made the success of Astrée : an incremental refinement of the analyzer until reaching the zero false alarm goal. The refinement concerns: the abstraction of process interactions (relational and history-sensitive abstractions), the scheduler model (supporting more synchronisation primitives and taking priorities into account), the memory model (supporting volatile variables), and the abstraction of dynamical data-structures (linked lists). Patrick Cousot is the principal investigator for this project.
VeriFault
This was a PEPS project for one year, coordinated by Cezara Drăgoi, on the topic of fault-tolerant distributed algorithms. These algorithms are notoriously difficult to implement correctly, due to asynchronous communication and the occurrence of faults, such as the network dropping messages or computers crashing. Although fault-tolerant algorithms are at the core of critical applications, there are no automated verification techniques that can deal with their complexity. Due to the complexity distributed systems have reached, we believe it is no longer realistic nor efficient to assume that high level specifications can be proved when development and verification are two disconnected steps in the software production process. Therefore we propose to introduce a domain specific language that has a high-level control structure which focuses on the algorithmic aspects rather than on low-level network and timer code, and makes programs amendable to automated verification.