Just-in-Time Certification

Abstract

Traditional, standards-based approaches to certification are hugely expensive, of questionable credibility when development is outsourced, and a barrier to innovation. This paper is a call and a manifesto for new approaches to certification. We start by advocating a goal-based approach in which unconditional claims delivered by formal methods are combined with other evidence in multi-legged cases supported by Bayesian analysis. We then describe the necessity, and the challenge, of extending this to compositional certification and outline promising directions for accomplishing this. Finally, we consider the provocative possibility of adaptive systems in which methods of analysis traditionally used to support certification at design time are instead used for synthesis and monitoring at runtime, and certification is performed "just-in-time."