Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

International Initiatives

Inria International Labs

Sino-European Laboratory in Computer Science, Automation and Applied Mathematics

Associate Team involved in the International Lab:

CONVEX

• Title: Compositional Verification of Cyber-Physical Systems

• International Partner (Institution - Laboratory - Researcher):

  • CAS (China) - State Key Laboratory of Computer Science - Naijun Zhan

• Start year: 2018

• See also: http://www.irisa.fr/prive/talpin/convex

• Formal modeling and verification methods have successfully improved software safety and security in vast application domains in transportation, production and energy. However, formal methods are labor-intensive and require highly trained software developers. Challenges facing formal methods stem from rapid evolution of hardware platforms, the increasing amount and cost of software infrastructures, and from the interaction between software, hardware and physics in networked cyber-physical systems.

  Automation and expressivity of formal verification tools must be improved not only to scale functional verification to very large software stacks, but also verify non-functional properties from models of hardware (time, energy) and physics (domain). Abstraction, compositionality and refinement are essential properties to provide the necessary scalability to tackle the complexity of system design with methods able to scale heterogeneous, concurrent, networked, timed, discrete and continuous models of cyber-physical systems.

  Project CONVEX wants to define a CPS architecture design methodology that takes advantage of existing time and concurrency modeling standards (MARTE, AADL, Ptolemy, Matlab), yet focuses on interfacing heterogeneous and exogenous models using simple, mathematically-defined structures, to achieve the single goal of correctly integrating CPS components.

Inria@SiliconValley

Associate Team involved in the International Lab:

Composite

• Title: Compositional System Integration

• International Partners (Institution - Laboratory - Researcher):

  • University of California, San Diego (United States) - Microelectronic Embedded Systems Laboratory - Rajesh Gupta

• Start year: 2017

• See also: http://www.irisa.fr/prive/talpin/composite

• Most applications that run somewhere on the internet are not optimized to do so. They execute on general purpose operating systems or on containers (virtual machines) that are built with the most conservative assumptions about their environment. While an application is specific, a large part of the system it runs on is unused, which is both a cost (to store and execute) and a security risk (many entry points).

  A unikernel, on the contrary, is a system program object that only contains the necessary the operating system services it needs for execution. A unikernel is build from the composition of a program, developed using high-level programming language, with modules of a library operating system (libOS), to execute directly on an hypervisor. A unikernel can boot in milliseconds to serve a request and shut down, demanding minimal energy and resources, offering stealthiest exposure time and surface to attacks, making them the ideal platforms to deploy on sensor networks, networks of embedded devices, smart grids and clouds.

  The goal of COMPOSITE is to develop the mathematical foundations for sound and efficient composition in system programming: analysis, verification and optimization technique for modular and compositional hardware-system-software integration of unikernels. We intend to further this development with the prospect of an end-to-end co-design methodology to synthesize lean and stealth networked embedded devices.