The Mondex case study about the specification and refinement of an electronic purse as defined in [SCJ00] has recently been proposed as a challenge for formal system-supported verification. This paper reports on the successful verification of the major part of the case study using the KIV specification and verification system. We demonstrate that even though the hand-made proofs were elaborated to an enormous level of detail we still could find small errors in the underlying data refinement theory as well as the formal proofs of the case study. We also provide an alternative formalisation of the communication protocol using abstract state machines. Finally the Mondex case study verifies functional correctness assuming a suitable security protocol. Therefore we propose to extend the case study to include the verification of a suitable security protocol.

The Mondex case study about the specification and refinement of an electronic purse as defined in [SCW00] has recently been proposed as a challenge for formal system-supported verification. In this paper we report on two results. First, on the successful verification of the full case study using the KIV specification and verification system. We demonstrate that even though the hand-made proofs were elaborated to an enormous level of detail we still could find small errors in the underlying data refinement theory as well as the formal proofs of the case study. Second, the original Mondex case study verifies functional correctness assuming a suitable security protocol. We extend the case study here with a refinement to a suitable security protocol that uses symmetric cryptography to achieve the necessary properties of the security-relevant messages. The definition is based on a generic framework for defining such protocols based on abstract state machines (ASMs). We prove the refinement using a forward simulation.

The versatility and wide applicability of the Abstract State Machines Method for the design and the analysis of computational systems has not yet been fully exploited for teaching. We suggest to use it for introducing basic algorithmic concepts in a succinct and uniform way, which makes the definitions adoptable in traditionally unrelated courses, covering the full range of computing science curricula from computation theory to the engineering of software systems.

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