Interface Explorer: A verification environment for large, complex applications

Automated tools are indispensable for high assurance software. They must (i) scale to handle very large applications; (ii) produce few or no indeterminate warnings; and (iii) be easily employed by domain specialists without substantial expertise in computer science. No tools available today can claim all those attributes while also delivering 100% assurance of security property verification and 100% assurance of detecting all runtime errors. They either do not claim 100% assurance, don't scale to large problems, or require substantial computer science expertise. Interface Explorer will help to achieve 100% assurance on large scale applications. The project’s strategy is natural for big problems: divide and conquer. On components, we will address the assurance gap, with easy to use, no-compromise delivery of 100% property assurance, scalable in performance with few or no indeterminate cases. At the system integration level, Interface Explorer will help to enable 100% assurance of properties expressing compliance with integration constraints. Today’s tools also use programming language semantics to express application level properties. This requires at least the trust that the absence of programming errors or weaknesses will assure application level properties. Interface Explorer will help to enable provable 100% assurance of application level properties.