An integrated specification and verification technique for highly concurrent data structures

Abstract

We present a technique for automatically verifying safety properties of concurrent programs, in particular programs that rely on subtle dependencies of local states of different threads, such as lock-free implementations of stacks and queues in an environment without garbage collection. Our technique addresses the joint challenges of infinitestate specifications, an unbounded number of threads, and an unbounded heap managed by explicit memory allocation. Our technique builds on the automata-theoretic approach to model checking, in which a specification is given by an automaton that observes the execution of a program and accepts executions that violate the intended specification. We extend this approach by allowing specifications to be given by a class of infinite-state automata. We show how such automata can be used to specify queues, stacks, and other data structures, by extending a data-independence argument. For verification, we develop a shape analysis, which tracks correlations between pairs of threads, and a novel abstraction to make the analysis practical.

Verification of heap manipulating programs with ordered data by extended forest automata

“…However, even this approach is strongly limited to SLLs, and it is also much less efficient than our current approach. In [2], concurrent programs operating on SLLs are analyzed using an adaptation of a transitive closure logic [5], which also tracks simple sortedness properties between data elements.…”

Advances in verification presented in TACAS’13

“…The approach is implemented and in addition to verifying (automatically) data structures that have not been verified in the past they show that for cases that have been in the scope of previous tools the new techniques affords some acceleration of the effort involved in verification. The TACAS'13 paper [1] already inspired further work. For example, in [9] the approach is extended to more expressive properties and handles more data structures.…”

“…In the paper An Integrated Specification and Verification Technique for Highly Concurrent Data Structures by Abdulla et al [2], which extends the TACAS'13 conference paper [1], the authors consider the topic of verifying data structures that are used in a concurrent environment. They combine several approaches in order to enable automatic verification.…”

“…Verification is the field B Nir Piterman nir.piterman@gmail.com 1 University of Leicester, Leicester, UK of research that aims to produce tools and techniques for proving correctness of programs and finding bugs that could hinder their performance. An active research community and much demand in industry for better and more scalable verification techniques are driving a thriving research field.…”

On Reducing Linearizability to State Reachability

“…Existing automated methods for proving linearizability of an atomic object implementation are also based on reductions to safety verification [1,10,12]. Vafeiadis [12] considers implementations where operation's linearization points are fixed to particular source-code locations.…”