Extracting EFSMs of web applications for formal requirements specification

  • Authors:
  • Andrey Zakonov;Anatoly Shalyto

  • Affiliations:
  • Mechanics and Optics, National Research University of Information Technologies, Saint-Petersburg, Russia;Mechanics and Optics, National Research University of Information Technologies, Saint-Petersburg, Russia

  • Venue:
  • SAFECOMP'12 Proceedings of the 31st international conference on Computer Safety, Reliability, and Security
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Web applications have begun to be used in wide variety of areas including social networks, shopping, online banking, control systems and other critical systems. Complexity of applications have raised as well as requirements for security and traceability. Due to short delivery times and changing requirements, quality assurance of web applications is usually an informal process. Formal methods have been proven to be safe approach to the specification, verification, and testing of systems. The aim of the proposed research is to make formal methods applicable to the web applications development. A technique that could extract extended finite state model by combination of static and dynamic analysis is developed. This method supports both applications with transitions between web pages and single-page applications with AJAX requests and dynamic DOM modifications. Two different algorithms are proposed that simplify the state model by merging similar states to achieve a human readable models even for the complex real world web applications. The obtained model could be used to define formal requirements for the application and to make model checking part of the continuous integration process for web development.