Technical Report No. 154 - Abstract

David Basin, Frank Rittinger, Luca Viganò
A Formal Analysis of the CORBA Security Service

We give a formal specification of the security service of CORBA, the Common Object Request Broker Architecture specified by the Object Management Group, OMG. In doing so, we tackle the problem of how one can apply lightweight formal methods to improve the precision and aid the analysis of a substantial, committee-designed, informal specification. Our approach is scenario-driven: we use representative scenarios to determine which parts of the informal specification should be formalized and then verify our formal specification against these scenarios. For the formalization, we have specified a significant part of the security service's data-model using the formal language Z. Through this process, we have been able to sharpen the OMG-specification, uncovering a number of errors and omissions.