A formal approach for the specification and verification of trustworthy component-based systems

Software systems are increasingly becoming ubiquitous affecting the way we experience the world. Embedded software systems, especially those used in smart devices, have become an essential constituent of the technological infrastructure of modern societies. Such systems, in order to be trusted in society, must be proved to be trustworthy. Trustworthiness is a composite non-functional property that implies safety, timeliness, security, availability, and reliability. This paper presents a formal approach for the development of trustworthy component-based systems. The approach involves a formal component model for the specification of component’s structure, functional, and non-functional (trustworthiness) properties, a model transformation technique for the automatic generation of component behavior using the specified structure and restricted by the specified properties, and a unified formal verification method for safety, security, reliability and availability properties using model checking.