SHF: Small: Data Model Verification for Web Applications
Description: A typical web application is a complicated distributed system
that consists of multiple components that run concurrently on multiple
machines and interact with each other in complex ways via the Internet.
As one would expect, developing such software systems is an error-prone
task, and existing software development processes are not robust enough
to produce dependable web applications. The tools developed as part of this
project could have a broad impact by enable software developers to eliminate
programming errors in web applications before they are deployed to end users.
The fundamental building block of a web application is the data model that
specifies the types of objects and the relations among the objects stored by
the application, the constraints on the relations, and the actions that update
the data by sending queries to the back-end datastore based on the user input.
The project develops techniques that automatically extract a formal
model from a given web application that characterizes how its data is stored
and modified based on user actions, and infers properties about the formal data
model. It is then possible to check the inferred properties by converting correctness
queries about the data model to queries about satisfiability of logical formulas,
and repair the data model to enforce the properties that are expected
to hold.
Funder: National Science Foundation
Amount: $499,900
Funding type: grant
Funder scheme: Standard Grant
Start date: 2014-07-15
End date: 2018-06-30
Investigator: Tevfik Bultan (lead)
Institutions: University of California, Santa Barbara, University of California-Santa Barbara
Subfield: Software
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Funded outputs count: 3
Funder award ID: 1423623
OpenAlex ID: G5706889890