Modular typestate checking of aliased objects

Bierhoff, Kevin; Aldrich, Jonathan

doi:10.1145/1297027.1297050

Cited by 127 publications

(191 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…We previously developed a sound (no false negatives) and modular (each method checked separately) type system that checks compliance with typestatebased protocols while a ording a great deal of aliasing exibility [7,3]. Typestates [33] allow specifying usage protocols as nite-state machines.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Typestates [33] allow specifying usage protocols as nite-state machines. Our approach tracks access permissions, which combine typestate and aliasing information, and was proven sound for core single-threaded [7] and multi-threaded [3] objectoriented calculi. Unlike previous approaches, access permissions do not require precise tracking of all object aliases (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Practical API Protocol Checking with Access Permissions

Bierhoff

Beckman

Aldrich

2009

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Abstract. Reusable APIs often de ne usage protocols. We previously developed a sound modular type system that checks compliance with typestate-based protocols while a ording a great deal of aliasing exibility. We also developed Plural, a prototype tool that embodies our approach as an automated static analysis and includes several extensions we found useful in practice. This paper evaluates our approach along the following dimensions: (1) We report on experience in specifying relevant usage rules for a large Java standard API with our approach. We also specify several other Java APIs and identify recurring patterns. (2) We summarize two case studies in verifying third-party open-source code bases with few false positives using our tool. We discuss how tool shortcomings can be addressed either with code refactorings or extensions to the tool itself. These results indicate that our approach can be used to specify and enforce real API protocols in practice.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Practical API Protocol Checking with Access Permissions

Bierhoff

Beckman

Aldrich

2009

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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“…They describe the sets of valid object states on which a method can be called. Simultaneous access permissions taxonomy [7] Plural provides five types of access permissions, namely, Unique, Full, Share, Pure, and Immutable. Figure 1 presents a taxonomy of how different access permissions can coexist, e.g.…”

Section: The Plural Specification Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

“…A similar direction is taken in [19] with a formal framework to model-check JML specification using the Bogor model-checker. The Plural group has conducted several case studies to verify API protocols using DFA techniques [7]. By contrast, our technique is able to analyze the specification for any possible concurrent execution of programs implementing it, while the DFA analysis of Plural is designed to study one program at a time.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This paper focuses on a case study about the use of (the existing tool) Plural [5] to specify and verify concurrency properties of an industrial application, and on our development of the Pulse tool [6] that enhances the analysis performed by Plural. The Plural specification language is based on a form of permissions known as access permissions [7] as well as typestates. While access permissions describe whether an object can be read or written through various references, typestates specify the legal order of operations that may be applied to the object, specified as a state machine [8].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A case study on the lightweight verification of a multi-threaded task server

Cataño

Ahmed²,

Siminiceanu

et al. 2014

Science of Computer Programming

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We present a case study of verifying the design of a commercial multi-threaded task server (MTTS), developed by the Novabase company, used for massively parallelising computational tasks. In a first stage, we employed the Plural tool, which is designed to perform lightweight verification of Java programs using a Data Flow Analysis (DFA) framework, to specify and verify the MTTS. We wrote the Plural specification for the MTTS based on the code developed by Novabase, its informal documentation, and our discussions with Novabase engineers, who validated our understanding of the MTTS application. The Plural specification language is based on typestates and access permissions. In a second stage, we developed the Pulse tool that enhances the analysis performed by Plural, and used the tool on the MTTS specifications. Pulse translates Plural specifications into an abstract state-machine model that captures the semantics of all the possible concurrent programs implementing the given specifications, and uses the evmdd-smc symbolic model-checker to verify the machine model. The experimental results on the MTTS specification show that the exhaustive model-checking approach scales reasonably well and is efficient at finding errors in specifications that were not previously detected with the Data Flow Analysis (DFA) capabilities of Plural.

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Behaviour abstraction adequacy criteria for API call protocol testing

Czemerinski

Braberman

Uchitel

2015

Software Testing Verif & Rel

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SUMMARYCode artefacts that have non-trivial requirements with respect to the ordering in which their methods or procedures ought to be called are common and appear, for instance, in the form of API implementations and objects. Testing such code artefacts to gain confidence that they conform to their intended protocols is an important and challenging problem. This paper proposes conformance testing adequacy criteria based on covering an abstraction of the intended behavior's semantics. Thus, the criteria are independent of the specification language and structure used to describe the intended protocol and the language used to implement it. As a consequence the results may be of use to black box conformance testing approaches in general. Experimental results show that the criteria are a good predictor for fault detection for protocol conformance and for classical structural coverage criteria such as statement and branch coverage. They also show that the division of the domain derived from the criterion produces subdomains such that most of its inputs are fault-revealing.

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Modular typestate checking of aliased objects

Cited by 127 publications

References 34 publications

Practical API Protocol Checking with Access Permissions

Practical API Protocol Checking with Access Permissions

A case study on the lightweight verification of a multi-threaded task server

Behaviour abstraction adequacy criteria for API call protocol testing

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