Certification of open-source software : a role for formal methods?

• Author(s): Barbosa, L. S. ; Cerone, Antonio ; Petrenko, Alexander ; Shaikh, Siraj A.
• Date: 2010
• Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/1822/20282
• Origin: RepositóriUM - Universidade do Minho
• Subject(s): Open source Software certification; Formal methods; Software quality
• Document Type: Article
• Language: English

Description

Despiteitshugesuccessandincreasingincorporationincom- plex, industrial-strength applications, open source software, by the very nature of its open, unconventional, distributed development model, is hard to assess and certify in an effective, sound and independent way. This makes its use and integration within safety or security-critical systems, a risk. And, simultaneously an opportunity and a challenge for rigourous, mathematically based, methods which aim at pushing software analysis and development to the level of a mature engineering discipline. This paper discusses such a challenge and proposes a number of ways in which open source development may benefit from the whole patrimony of formal methods.