[TUHS] Formal Specification and Verification (was Re: TUHS Digest, Vol 33, Issue 5)

[Perry E. Metzger]

On Mon, 20 Aug 2018 09:47:58 +1000 George Michaelson
<ggm at algebras.org> wrote:
> Witness to this, the interest in *trying* to apply Coq to Ethereum
> smart contracts...

The Tezos cryptocurrency was created with a smart contract language
specifically designed for formal verification.

> I think Perry wrote something of long term value. I encourage you to
> write this up somewhere you'd be willing to have published like a
> tech blog.

Not sure where one would publish it.

I also note that the general response here was the one I almost always
get when I mention this stuff to people, which is near silence. (I
used to get exactly this response 30 or 35 years ago when explaining
the Internet to most people who had not yet come into contact with it,
so I suppose it's not overly surprising.)

That said, let me make a strong prediction: in not very many years,
pretty much everyone doing serious work in computer science (say,
designing security protocols, building mission critical systems, etc.)
will be building them using some sort of formal verification assistant
systems. I suspect this change will be as transformative as the
triumph of high level languages over the previous supremacy of machine
language coding. (For those that forget, one of the things that made
Unix successful was, of course, that unlike many other OSes of the
era, it was (ultimately) written in a portable language and not in
machine code.)

People who don't use formal verification when writing serious code
will seem as antiquated and irresponsible as people who build mission
critical systems now without test coverage. This is going to be a big
revolution.


Perry


> -G
> 
> On Sun, Aug 19, 2018 at 5:57 AM, Perry E. Metzger
> <perry at piermont.com> wrote:
> > Sorry for the thread necromancy, but this is a _very_ important
> > topic. Perhaps it doesn't belong on tuhs but rather on coff.
> >
> > This is a pretty long posting. If you don't care to read it, the
> > TL;DR is that formal specification and verification is now a real
> > discipline, which it wasn't in the old days, and there are
> > systems to do it in, and it's well understood.
> >
> > On 2018-08-06 at 08:52 -0700, Bakul Shah wrote:  
> >>
> >> What counts as a "formal spec"? Is it like Justice Potter
> >> Stewart's "I know it when I see it" definition or something
> >> better?  
> >
> > At this point, we have a good definition. A formal specification
> > is a description of the behavior of a program or piece of
> > hardware in a precise machine-readable form that may be used as
> > the basis for fully formal verification of the behavior of an
> > implementation. Often these days, the specification is given in a
> > formal logic, such as the predicative calculus of inductive
> > constructions, which is the logic underlying the Coq system.
> >
> > Isabelle/HOL is another popular system for this sort of work.
> > ACL2 is (from what I can tell) of more historical interest but it
> > has apparently been used for things like the formal verification
> > of floating point and cache control units for real hardware. (It
> > is my understanding that it has been many years since Intel would
> > dare release a system where the cache unit wasn't verified, and
> > the only time in decades it tried to release a non-verified FPU,
> > it got the FDIV bug and has never tried that again.) There are
> > some others out there, like F*, Lean, etc.
> >
> > Formal specifications good enough for full formal verification
> > have been made for a variety of artifacts along with proofs that
> > the artifacts follow the specification. There's a fully formally
> > verified C compiler called CompCert for example, based on an
> > operational semantics written in Coq. There's another formal
> > semantics for C written in K, which is a rather different formal
> > system. There's a verified microkernel, seL4, whose specification
> > is written in Isabelle/HOL. There's a fully formal specification
> > of the RISC V, and an associated verified RTL implementation.
> >
> > Generally speaking, a formal specification:
> >
> > 1) Must be machine readable
> > 2) The semantics of the underlying specification language must
> >    themselves be extremely precisely described. You can't prove
> > the consistency and completeness of the underlying system (see
> > G__del) but you _can_ still strongly specify the language.
> > 3) Must be usable for formal (that is, machine checkable) proofs
> > that implementations comply with the spec, so it has to be
> > sufficiently powerful. Typical systems are now equivalent to
> > higher order logic.
> >
> > From: "Hellwig Geisse" <hellwig.geisse at mni.thm.de>
> > Sent:Mon, 06 Aug 2018 18:30:30 +0200  
> >>
> >>  For me, a "formal spec" should serve two goals:
> >>  1) You can reason about the thing that is specified.  
> >
> > Yes.
> >
> > 2) The spec can be "executed" (i.e., there is an  
> >>  interpreting mechanism, which lets the spec behave
> >>  like the real thing).  
> >
> > Not always reasonable.
> >
> > First, it is often the case that a spec does not describe
> > execution at all. See, for example, the specification of a
> > sorting function I give at the end of this message: it simply
> > says "a sorting function is a function such that, for all inputs,
> > the return is a non-decreasing permutation of the input". This is
> > not executable. It is a purely descriptive property, and you
> > cannot extract an executable algorithm from the spec.
> >
> > Second, even when a spec amounts to a description of execution, a
> > proof assistant often cannot actually execute it. For example,
> > although you can reason about non-terminating execution in pCiC
> > (and thus Coq), programs written in a strongly normalizing lambda
> > calculus that can be used as a logic must terminate, or functions
> > that did not terminate would be inhabitants of all types and the
> > logic would be inconsistent. Thus, you cannot execute a program
> > with infinite loops inside Coq, although you can reason about
> > them (and indeed, you can reason about coinductively defined
> > objects like infinite execution traces.)
> >
> > On Mon, 06 Aug 2018 14:19:31 -0700 "Steve Johnson"
> > <scj at yaccman.com> wrote:  
> >> I take a somewhat more relaxed view of what a spec should be:
> >> It should describe a program with enough completeness that a
> >> competent programmer could write it from the spec alone.  
> >
> > I think this is a bit more relaxed than is currently accepted.
> >  
> >> The formal systems I have seen would roll over and die when
> >> presented with even a simple compiler.__  
> >
> > I don't know what this means. If it is that there aren't
> > implementations of languages like pCiC, that's not true, see Coq.
> > If it means no one can formally specify a compiler, given that
> > formally verified compilers exist, that's also not true.
> >
> > The "final theorem" proving the correctness of CompCert depends on
> > having an operational semantics of both C and the target
> > architecture, and says (more or less) that the observed behavior
> > of the input program in C is the same as the observed behavior of
> > the output program (say in ARM machine language). This is a
> > serious piece of work, but it is also something that has actually
> > been done -- the tools are capable of the task.
> >  
> >> Additionally, being able to specify that a particular function be
> >> carried out by a heapsort, for example, would require that the
> >> formalism could describe the heapsort and prove it correct.__
> >> These don't grow on trees...  
> >
> > Formally verifying a couple of sorting algorithms described in
> > Coq is a exercise for an intro level class on formal
> > verification. I've done it. Once you have the proper primitives
> > described, the specification for a sorting algorithm in Coq looks
> > like this:
> >
> > Definition is_a_sorting_algorithm (f: list nat -> list nat) :=
> >   forall al, Permutation al (f al) /\ sorted (f al).
> >
> > That says "the property "is_a_sorting_algorithm" over a function
> > from lists of natural numbers to lists of natural numbers is that
> > the output is a permutation of the input in which all the
> > elements are in non-decreasing order." The definitions in
> > question are very precise. For example, one definition of sorted
> > (the property of being a non-decreasing list) is:
> >
> > Definition sorted (al: list nat) :=
> >  forall i j, i < j < length al -> nth i al 0 <= nth j al 0.
> >
> > and the property of being a permutation, which is relatively
> > complicated inductively defined property, is:
> >
> > Inductive Permutation {A : Type} : list A -> list A -> Prop :=
> >     perm_nil : Permutation
> >   | perm_skip : forall (x : A) (l l' : list A),
> >                 Permutation l l' ->
> >                 Permutation (x :: l) (x :: l')
> >   | perm_swap : forall (x y : A) (l : list A),
> >                 Permutation (y :: x :: l) (x :: y :: l)
> >   | perm_trans : forall l l' l'' : list A,
> >                  Permutation l l' ->
> >                  Permutation l' l'' ->
> >                  Permutation l l''.
> >
> > Coq starts out with basically nothing defined, by the way. Notions
> > such as "natural number" and "list" are not built in. Peano
> > naturals are defined in the system thusly:
> >
> > Inductive nat : Type :=
> >   | O : nat
> >   | S : nat -> nat.
> >
> > The underlying basis of Coq (i.e. the Predicative Calculus of
> > Inductive Constructions) is a dependently typed lambda calculus
> > that's astonishingly simple, and the checker for proofs in the
> > system is only a few hundred lines long -- the checker is the
> > only portion of the system which needs to be trusted.
> >
> > In recent years, I've noted that "old timers" (such as many of us,
> > myself included) seem to be unaware of the fact that systems like
> > Coq exist, or that it is now relatively (I emphasize
> > _relatively_) routine for substantial systems to be fully
> > formally specified and then fully formally verified.
> >
> >
> > Perry
> > --
> > Perry E. Metzger                perry at piermont.com  
> 



-- 
Perry E. Metzger		perry at piermont.com