Research Projects

Safety violations and cyber-attacks due to design or implementation errors in safety-critical systems are increasingly common. To tackle the extremely challenging task of safety verification of such systems, many industrial safety certification standards, including DO178C (avionics), ISO26262 (automotive), EN50128 (railways) and IEEE1228-1994 (software) recommend using formal methods. In India, formal methods for safety-critical-system validation is not widely practiced, possibly due to lack of established frameworks and tools, trained manpower and a concerted national effort to build such frameworks. Furthermore, deployment of indigenous software and systems in safety-critical applications has been significantly impaired due to lack of in-house competence in formal validation and certification in niche technology domains. We propose a networked center as a national effort for developing formal verification practices for safety-critical ICT systems, leveraging leading expertise from three IITs. Our deliverables include efficient formal tools and frameworks for verification and reverse engineering for vulnerability discovery and remediation.