This volume presents the latest research worldwide on communications protocols, emphasizing specification and compliance testing. It presents the complete proceedings of the fifteenth meeting on `Protocol Specification, Testing and Verification' arranged by the International Federation for Information Processing.

The contributions to this book are from researchers and practitioners concerned with the theory and application of formal methods to the specification, testing and verification of protocols for open systems. Being the tenth in a successful series of symposia, a special feature of the book is a number of invited papers on the same theme, The First Ten Years, The Next Ten Years''.

FORTE/PSTV '97 addresses Formal Description Techniques (FDTs) applicable to Distributed Systems and Communication Protocols (such as Estelle, LOTOS, SDL, ASN.1, TTCN, Z, Automata, Process Algebra, Logic). The conference is a forum for presentation of the state-of-the-art in theory, application, tools and industrialization of FDTs, and provides an excellent orientation for newcomers.

This volume contains the proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Aided Veri?cation (CAV), held in Edinburgh, Scotland, July 6–10, 2005. CAV 2005 was the seventeenth in a series of conferences dedicated to the advancement of the theory and practice of computer-assisted formal an- ysis methods for software and hardware systems. The conference covered the spectrum from theoretical results to concrete applications, with an emphasis on practical veri?cation tools and the algorithms and techniques that are needed for their implementation. We received 123 submissions for regular papers and 32 submissions for tool papers.Ofthesesubmissions,theProgramCommitteeselected32regularpapers and 16 tool papers, which formed the technical program of the conference. The conference had three invited talks, by Bob Bentley (Intel), Bud Mishra (NYU), and George C. Necula (UC Berkeley). The conference was preceded by a tutorial day, with two tutorials: – Automated Abstraction Re?nement, by Thomas Ball (Microsoft) and Ken McMillan (Cadence); and – Theory and Practice of Decision Procedures for Combinations of (First- Order) Theories, by Clark Barrett (NYU) and Cesare Tinelli (U Iowa). CAV 2005 had six a?liated workshops: – BMC 2005: 3rd Int. Workshop on Bounded Model Checking; – FATES 2005: 5th Workshop on Formal Approaches to Testing Software; – GDV 2005: 2nd Workshop on Games in Design and Veri?cation; – PDPAR 2005: 3rd Workshop on Pragmatics of Decision Procedures in - tomated Reasoning; – RV 2005: 5th Workshop on Runtime Veri?cation; and – SoftMC 2005: 3rd Workshop on Software Model Checking.

This PSTV'94 Symposium is the fourteenth of a series of annual meetings organized under the auspices of IFIP W.G. 6.1, a Working Group dedicated to "Architectures and Protocols for Computer Networks". This is the oldest and most established symposium in the emerging field of protocol engineering which has spawn many international conferences including FORTE (International Conference on Formal Description Tech niques), IWPTS (International Workshop on Protocol Test Systems), ICNP (Interna tional Conference on Network Protocols) and CAY (Conference on Computer-Aided Verification). The main objective of this PSTV symposium is to provide a forum for researchers and practitioners in industry and academia interested in advances in using formal methods and methodologies to specify, develop, test and verify communication protocols and distributed systems. This year's PSTV symposium enjoys a nice mixture of formal methods and practical issues in network protocols through the invited addresses of three outstanding speakers, Ed Brinksma (University of Twente), Raj Jain (Ohio State University) and David Tennenhouse (MIT) as well as 5 tutorials, in addition to 9 techni cal sessions and two practical panel sessions. The 5 tutorials are offered on the first day in two parallel tracks for intensive exposure on hot topics of current interest. This year, out of 51 submissions the Program Committee selected 18 regular papers (with an allotment of 16 pages in the Proceedings) and 9 mini-papers (of 8 pages).