AnWeb: a System for Automatic Support to Web Application Verification

In this paper we propose a formal method for web applications verification. The verification process is carried out by checking that either the system always satisfies a model of the specifications or by producing a counter-example.We represent the system as a Kripke structure and model a web site as a graph. Model checking is reformulated as checking that each initial state satisfies the specifications. We adopt Computation Tree Logic (CTL) as language to define the properties to be verified.The proposed formal method has been deployed in AnWeb, a tool for automatic support in the design of web applications. The tool provides an interface to the SMV model checker. The system parses the HTML source code of web pages, including code for dynamic pages, builds the model in SMV input language and provides the proper CTL specifications to the SMV tool.