Flemming Nielson and Hanne Riis Nielson: Formal Methods: an appetizer

Springer, 2019, 160 pages, ISBN 978-3-030-05155-6
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-05156-3

Summary

Teaching and convincing practitioners to adopt formal methods in system engineering is admittedly still a challenge. This book aims at generating “appetite” in undergraduate students by introducing some classical formal methods trying to rely on intuition, simple examples, and a “metaformalism” rooted in graph theory which is better known than more sophisticated mathematics at the undergraduate level. The selected areas of application of formal methods are language semantics and program verification. The exposition is generally clear although the adopted notation is sometimes mathematically heavy.

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Prof. Dines Bjørner, professor emeritus of computer science at the Technical University of Denmark (DK), has been awarded the FME Fellowship 2021. The Fellowships are awarded every three years in recognition of technical breakthroughs and pioneering work in advancing, applying, and promoting mathematically rigorous methods for the design of computing systems.

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Rosario Giustolisi: Modelling and Verification of Secure Exams

Springer, 2018, 133 pages, ISBN 978-3-319-67106-2
https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319671062

Summary

Exams are an important aspect in assessing people’s skills and as such play a key role to establish meritocracy in modern societies. To be effective, however, exams need to be fair and secure against tampering, which is where Rosario Giustolisi’s book “Modelling and Verification of Secure Exams'' [5] comes to the rescue. Over 133 pages, the book describes the different aspects of exams in detail and identifies various security-related requirements for them. Moreover, the book describes how to formally model an exam using the applied pi-calculus and how to verify security requirements for it using the ProVerif verifier. Finally, the book presents the outcome of modelling and analysing three popular example protocols. This book might be of interest to everyone who wants to learn more about the nature of exams in general, and in particular about how to model and verify them. To fully appreciate the book, however, some familiarity with the applied pi-calculus and in particular the ProVerif verifier is necessary.

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FME’s Teaching Committee is launching a new tutorial series, planned to be held monthly. We aim to increase the awareness and sharing of tools and techniques used for teaching formal methods. The tutorial will be held online via zoom.

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The Annual General Meeting of FME will take place online, May 6 2021.

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The 70th Business Meeting of FME will take place December 10, 2020.

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CAVlinks: A platform for students and researchers interested in computer-aided verification

CAVlinks is a platform for students and researchers interested in computer-aided verification. The website aims to be an entry point for new students by presenting links to introductory and advanced study material in the areas relevant to CAV (e.g. logics, theoretical CS, and formal methods), by pointing to interesting events (e.g. workshops, student forums, conferences maintained in a public calendar), and by advertising mentoring possibilities.

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