VSTTE Competition 2013

Update: Submission deadline extended

We now accept submissions until end of 2013, and will evaluate them afterwards

VSComp 2013 – An Authoritative DNS Server

Introduction

While verification of software is mature for many domains, verified implementations are rarely available for core services used worldwide on a daily basis. The robustness of servers and clients used as core internet services by everybody is lacking. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures database (https://cve.mitre.org/) shows many problems, both logical errors and those caused by low-level programming language choices (buffer overflows, double free, …).

In this competition we want to encourage the verified software community to demonstrate the state-of-the-art of their tools by implementing and verifying one of the core Internet services, the Domain Name Service (DNS), in their tool(s) of choice. The Domain Name Service is responsible for translating domain names (such as www.vscomp.org) into Internet Protocol (IP) addresses (such as 130.107.1.243), which are used for routing traffic. Without DNS, we would need to remember those IP addresses all the time, which is in fact how Internet communication was handled before DNS was invented and deployed.

We chose DNS because it is crucial for the Internet, was invented 25 years ago, has remained relatively stable in its specification since then, and is still running. Because DNS is used by a wide variety of other protocols and is the most popular protocol to resolve domain names, we believe it will around for a long time. DNS was specified by the IETF in RFC 1035 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1035) and, while several additions (such as the incorporation of IPv6 records) have been proposed over the years, the protocol and method of operation remains unchanged. In this competition we focus on the core part of DNS.

The following pages (also accessible by menu, above) contain further information about the requirements of the competition, which ends at 09:00 Monday, 22 April 2013 GMTthe end of the year 2013 (in any time zone):

The same information is also available as a single PDF.

Submissions should be sent to vscomp2013@gmail.com. If there are any questions about the task, please either comment on this website or ask by mail.