The 2017 SEI Year in Review highlights the work of the institute undertaken from October 1, 2016, to September 30, 2017. This blog post, which was published in the 2017 Year in Review, highlights the work of three SEI researchers who work to help military analysts in the age of big data.

When we verify a software program, we increase our confidence in its trustworthiness. We can be confident that the program will behave as it should and meet the requirements it was designed to fulfill. Verification is an ongoing process because software continuously undergoes change. While software is being created, developers upgrade and patch it, add new features, and fix known bugs. When software is being compiled, it evolves from program language statements to executable code. Even during runtime, software is transformed by just-in-time compilation. Following every such transformation, we need assurance that the change has not altered program behavior in some unintended way and that important correctness and security properties are preserved. The need to re-verify a program after every change presents a major challenge to practitioners--one that is central to our research. This blog post describes solutions that we are exploring to address that challenge and to raise the level of trust that verification provides.