NDLI: Empirical Study Towards a Leading Indicator for Cost of Formal Software Verification

Content Provider	IEEE Xplore Digital Library
Author	Matichuk, D. Murray, T. Andronick, J. Jeffery, R. Klein, G. Staples, M.
Copyright Year	2015
Description	Author affiliation: NICTA, Sydney, NSW, Australia (Matichuk, D.; Murray, T.; Andronick, J.; Jeffery, R.; Klein, G.; Staples, M.)
Abstract	Formal verification can provide the highest degree of software assurance. Demand for it is growing, but there are still few projects that have successfully applied it to sizeable, real-world systems. This lack of experience makes it hard to predict the size, effort and duration of verification projects. In this paper, we aim to better understand possible leading indicators of proof size. We present an empirical analysis of proofs from the landmark formal verification of the seL4 microkernel and the two largest software verification proof developments in the Archive of Formal Proofs. Together, these comprise 15,018 individual lemmas and approximately 215,000 lines of proof script. We find a consistent quadratic relationship between the size of the formal statement of a property, and the final size of its formal proof in the interactive theorem prover Isabelle. Combined with our prior work, which has indicated that there is a strong linear relationship between proof effort and proof size, these results pave the way for effort estimation models to support the management of large-scale formal verification projects.
Starting Page	722
Ending Page	732
File Size	919150
Page Count	11
File Format	PDF
ISBN	9781479919345
DOI	10.1109/ICSE.2015.85
Language	English
Publisher	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Publisher Date	2015-05-16
Publisher Place	Italy
Access Restriction	Subscribed
Rights Holder	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subject Keyword	Size measurement Software Complexity theory Estimation Approximation methods Mathematical model formal verification seL4 Isabelle proof engineering
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article

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