A Concurrent Specification of POSIX File Systems

Ntzik, Gian; Pinto, Pedro da Rocha; Sutherland, Julian; Gardner, Philippa

doi:10.4230/lipics.ecoop.2018.4

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…In this work, the analysis, mainly syntactic, resulted in a set of building blocks used in maintainer scripts that may be used in a DSL. In a series of papers [23,34,33], Ntzik et al consider the formal reasoning on the Posix scripts manipulating the file system based on (concurrent) separation logic. Not only do they employ a different logic (a second-order logic), but they also focus on (manual) proof techniques for correctness and not on automatic techniques for finding bugs.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The CoLiS platform for the analysis of maintainer scripts in Debian software packages

Becker

Jeannerod

Marché

et al. 2022

Int J Softw Tools Technol Transfer

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The software packages of the Debian distribution include more than twenty-seven thousand maintainer scripts in total, almost all of them being written in the Posix shell language. These scripts are executed with root privileges at installation, update, and removal of a package, which makes them critical for system maintenance. While the Debian policy provides guidance for package maintainers producing the scripts, only few tools exist to check the compliance of a script to that policy. We present CoLiS, a software platform for discovering violations of non-trivial properties required by the Debian policy in maintainer scripts. We describe our methodology which is based on symbolic execution and feature tree constraints, and we give an overview of the toolchain. We obtain promising results: our toolchain is effective in analysing a large set of Debian maintainer scripts, and it has already detected over 150 policy violations that have lead to bug reports, more than two-third of them now being fixed.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The CoLiS platform for the analysis of maintainer scripts in Debian software packages

Becker

Jeannerod

Marché

et al. 2022

Int J Softw Tools Technol Transfer

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“…Modeling File System Operations. Several researchers have designed specifications for the posix file system [9,14,24]. The specifications mainly focus on program reasoning and verification.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Practical fault detection in puppet programs

Sotiropoulos

Mitropoulos

Spinellis

2020

Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering

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Puppet is a popular computer system configuration management tool. By providing abstractions that model system resources it allows administrators to set up computer systems in a reliable, predictable, and documented fashion. Its use suffers from two potential pitfalls. First, if ordering constraints are not correctly specified whenever a Puppet resource depends on another, the nondeterministic application of resources can lead to race conditions and consequent failures. Second, if a service is not tied to its resources (through the notification construct), the system may operate in a stale state whenever a resource gets modified. Such faults can degrade a computing infrastructure's availability and functionality.We have developed an approach that identifies these issues through the analysis of a Puppet program and its system call trace. Specifically, a formal model for traces allows us to capture the interactions of Puppet resources with the file system. By analyzing these interactions we identify (1) resources that are related to each other (e.g., operate on the same file), and (2) resources that should act as notifiers so that changes are correctly propagated. We then check the relationships from the trace's analysis against the program's dependency graph: a representation containing all the ordering constraints and notifications declared in the program. If a mismatch is detected, our system reports a potential fault.We have evaluated our method on a large set of popular Puppet modules, and discovered 92 previously unknown issues in 33 modules. Performance benchmarking shows that our approach can analyze in seconds real-world configurations with a magnitude measured in thousands of lines and millions of system calls. CCS CONCEPTS• Software and its engineering → Software reliability; Software testing and debugging; File systems management.

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Analysing installation scenarios of Debian packages

Becker

Jeannerod

Marché

et al. 2020

Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems

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The Debian distribution includes more than 28 thousand maintainer scripts, almost all of them are written in Posix shell. These scripts are executed with root privileges at installation, update, and removal of a package, which make them critical for system maintenance. While Debian policy provides guidance for package maintainers producing the scripts, few tools exist to check the compliance of a script to it. We report on the application of a formal verification approach based on symbolic execution to find violations of some non-trivial properties required by Debian policy in maintainer scripts. We present our methodology and give an overview of our toolchain. We obtained promising results: our toolchain is effective in analysing a large set of Debian maintainer scripts and it pointed out over 150 policy violations that lead to reports (more than half already fixed) on the Debian Bug Tracking system.

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A Concurrent Specification of POSIX File Systems

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

The CoLiS platform for the analysis of maintainer scripts in Debian software packages

The CoLiS platform for the analysis of maintainer scripts in Debian software packages

Practical fault detection in puppet programs

Analysing installation scenarios of Debian packages

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