Formal Specification Languages for Network Protocols

ASN.1

• More details on ASN.1, including documentation and tools.
• SNMP MIBs are written in SMIv1 and SMIv2. The libsmi software package contains a tool named smilint which allows to verify SMI MIB modules for syntax and, to some degree, semantic correctness. It has a BSD-like license.

BNF

• ABNF parser written in Perl
• ABNF validator (web form)
• ANTLR EBNF parsing tool

SDL

• SDL Forum Society, with an introduction to SDL
• SITE: tools for the specification language SDL
• Telelogic tools and articles

XML

• Apache project's Xerces validating parser
• online schema validator
• Validator for XML Schema REC (20010502) version
• XML Schema Quality Checker by IBM alphaWorks
• There are also a number of commercial products that can be used to validate schemas:
  • Altova's XML Spy
  • Tibco's Extensibility Platform
  • Oracle's XML products

TTCN

• TTCN-3: language for specifying many types of system tests
• check TTCN-3 module online
• free parser
• Telelogic

UML

• Telelogic information on UML, including papers, articles and tools from Telelogic

Other References

• Telelogic languages
• PDL, a protocol description language offering bit-level description
• Gouda, Elements of Network Protocol Design, ISBN 0-471-19744-0.
• Gerard Holzmann, Design and Validation of Computer Protocols, Prentice Hall, 1990.
• Verification of communication protocols, MIT Ph.D. thesis
• Verification languages (list of links)
• netbib has references on protocol verification.

Contributors