Necessity specifications for robustness
Julian Mackay, Susan Eisenbach, James Noble, Sophia Drossopoulou · Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages · 2022
Robust modules guarantee to do only what they are supposed to do – even in the presence of untrusted malicious clients, and considering not just the direct behaviour of individual methods, but also the emergent behaviour from calls to more than one method. Necessity is a language for specifying robustness, based on novel necessity operators capturing temporal implication, and a proof logic that derives explicit robustness specifications from functional specifications. Soundness and an exemplar proof are mechanised in Coq.