Towards the Formal Development of Software Based Systems: Access Control System as a Case Study

Abstract

Our daily life is increasingly becoming more and more dependent on software as they are being extensively used to control safety and mission-critical systems. This has lead to very stringent verification requirements for ensuring that the software performs as intended. However, the testing based techniques cannot provide a rigorous verification due to limited computational and memory constraints and traditional formal verification techniques, like model checking and theorem proving, are not too straightforward to work with in the industrial setting. In this paper, as a first step to overcome these limitations, we describe a hybrid property based testing and model checking based technique for verifying both models and implementation of access control systems. Our approach addresses the model checking of critical properties of access control systems and aims at improving their reliability by using property based testing to analyze the corresponding software code. For illustration purposes, a simple example of an access control system is used.

Model Checking Based Approach for Compliance Checking

“…Differently, the focus of the proposed method is on the abstraction more than on the quality and robustness of the built models. Boucherit et al in [3] verify both model and implementation of a software system using an hybrid approach combining property base testing and model checking technique. They propose an approach based on Petri Nets and illustrate its functioning through a simple example related to an access control system.…”