Challenges of Software Verification

This book provides an overview about the open challenges in software verification. Software verification is a branch of software engineering aiming at guaranteeing that software applications satisfy some requirements of interest. Over the years, the software verification community has proposed and considered several techniques: abstract interpretation, data-flow analysis, type systems, model checking are just a few examples. The theoretical advances have been always motivated by practical challenges that have led to an equal evolution of both these sides of software verification. Indeed, several verification tools have been proposed by the research community and any software application, in order to guarantee that certain software requirements are met, needs to integrate a verification phase in its life cycle, independently of the context of application or software size. This book is aimed at collecting contributions discussing recent advances in facing open challenges in software verification, relying on a broad spectrum of verification techniques. This book collects contributions ranging from theoretical to practical arguments, and it is aimed at both researchers in software verification and their practitioners.

Vincenzo Arceri is a no-tenure track assistant professor at the Department of Mathematical, Physical, and Computer Sciences, University of Parma, and his research focuses on static software analysis and verification, having 7 years of experience in this research field, in which he published on international conferences and journals related to software analysis, formal methods for software security, programming languages, and software engineering (including ACM TOPS, Information and Computation, VMCAI, ACM SIGAPP SAC). His main research interests include static program analysis, string analysis and verification (in particular for dynamic languages), abstract interpretation and, more in general, formal methods for program security.

Agostino Cortesi is a full professor at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. He has over 25 years of experience in the area of software verification, having published over 150 articles in high-level international journals and international conference proceedings. He has been a member of numerous program committees for international conferences (e.g., SAS, VMCAI) and editorial committees of scientific journals (Computer Languages, Journal of Universal Computer Science). He is currently the head of the Ph.D. program in Computer Science at Ca’ Foscari. His main research interests concern programming language theory and static analysis techniques, with particular focus to security applications. He is the coordinator of the EU Horizon2020 “Families_Share” project and has held the position of head of unit of the H2020 project EQUAL-IST and of the COST project “Eutypes”. He also directs the project MAE Italy-India 2017-19 “Formal Specification for Secured Software System” and the FIRST Covid-19 F2F project.

Prof. Pietro Ferrara is an assistant professor at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. He is an expert on static analysis based on abstract interpretation with a focus on the detection of security vulnerabilities in object-oriented programs. He joined the University of Venice in November 2019 as a tenure track assistant professor. Previously, from 2013 to 2019, he worked in industry gaining experience in delivering prototypes and commercial tools to customers filling the gap between scientific research and development and delivery of software products, as well as technical and commercial presentation to customers, evaluation activities, and preparation of commercial and technical documentation.

Martina Olliaro is a postdoc researcher at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Italy) and Masaryk University of Brno (Czech Republic), under the supervision of both Professors Agostino Cortesi and Vashek Matyas. Her main research interest concerns string static analysis by means of abstract interpretation theory, with a focus to the string-related security issues. She is also interested in watermarking relational databases techniques and in the study of their semantics preservation.