At the 2022 European Joint Conferences (ESOP, FASE, FoSSaCS and TACAS) on Theory and Practice of Software (ETAPS), a multi-institutional team of researchers from AIT (Dejan Nickovic), ISTA (Thomas A. Henzinger, Thomas Ferrere) and TU Wien Informatics (Ezio Bartocci, Ana Oliveira da Costa has been recognized by the European Association of Software Science and Technology (EASST) with the Best Software Science Paper Award for their work “Information-flow Interfaces”.

ETAPS, held in Munich April 2-7, 2022 is the primary European forum for academic and industrial researchers working on topics relating to software science. ETAPS was established in 1998 and includes four annual conferences ESOP, FASE, FoSSaCS and TACAS and several satellite workshops.

Abstract

Contract-based design is a promising methodology for taming the complexity of developing sophisticated systems. A formal contract distinguishes between assumptions, which are constraints that the designer of a component puts on the environments in which the component can be used safely, and guarantees, which are promises that the designer asks from the team that implements the component. A theory of formal contracts can be formalized as an interface theory, which supports the composition and refinement of both assumptions and guarantees.

Although there is a rich landscape of contract-based design methods that address functional and extra-functional properties, we present the first interface theory that is designed for ensuring system-wide security properties. Our framework provides a refinement relation and a composition operation that support both incremental design and independent implementability. We develop our theory for both stateless and stateful interfaces. We illustrate the applicability of our framework with an example inspired from the automotive domain.

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