The VerCors project

Amighi, Afshin; Blom, Stefan; Huisman, Marieke; Zaharieva-Stojanovski, Marina

doi:10.1145/2103776.2103785

Cited by 16 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…The VerCors project concentrates on the application of permission-based Separation Logic to multi-threaded Java programs [9], [10]. It focuses in particular on the concurrent data structures of the Java API, where the goal is to specify and verify full functional correctness properties, rather than to reason only about interference between multiple threads.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Formal Specifications for Java's Synchronisation Classes

Amighi

Blom

Huisman

et al. 2014

2014 22nd Euromicro International Conference on Parallel, Distributed, and Network-Based Processing

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This paper discusses formal specification and verification of the synchronisation classes of the Java API. In many verification systems for concurrent programs, synchronisation is treated as a primitive operation. As a result, verification rules for synchronisation are hard-coded in the logic, and not verified. These rules describe the concrete semantics of the given synchronisation primitive, and manage how resources are protected by synchronisation.In contrast, this paper describes several synchronisation primitives at the specification level, by specifying the behaviour of synchronisation routines from the Java API at method level using permission-based Separation Logic. This gives a generalised, high-level, and easily extendable approach to formalisation of arbitrary synchronisation mechanisms, which allows for modular treatment of synchronisation in verification. Notably, our approach does not only apply to locks, but also to other synchronisation mechanisms such as semaphores and latches that we also discuss in the paper. Finally, we used the verification tool that we are developing and successfully verified (so far simplified) reference implementations of all presented synchronisers; the paper discusses the verification of one of them.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Formal Specifications for Java's Synchronisation Classes

Amighi

Blom

Huisman

et al. 2014

2014 22nd Euromicro International Conference on Parallel, Distributed, and Network-Based Processing

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“…The specifications are readable even without the code, and therefore can be used as formally written documentation. Future Work The work described here are only the first steps in the VerCors project [1], and there is still much work to be done in the future. A first important step is to develop tool support, so that the history-based specifications can be validated w.r.t.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Furthermore, we claim that the history pattern is also useful for specifying other concurrent data structures; in particular we have also specified the ConcurrentHashMap using the same idea. Support to reason about historybased specifications will be integrated into the tool set that is currently being developed as part of the VerCors project [1] (Verification of Concurrent Data Structures).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A History of BlockingQueues

Zaharieva-Stojanovski¹,

Huisman²,

Blom³

2012

Electron. Proc. Theor. Comput. Sci.

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This paper describes a way to formally specify the behaviour of concurrent data structures. When specifying concurrent data structures, the main challenge is to make specifications stable, i.e., to ensure that they cannot be invalidated by other threads. To this end, we propose to use history-based specifications: instead of describing method behaviour in terms of the object's state, we specify it in terms of the object's state history. A history is defined as a list of state updates, which at all points can be related to the actual object's state. We illustrate the approach on the BlockingQueue hierarchy from the java.util.concurrent library. We show how the behaviour of the interface BlockingQueue is specified, leaving a few decisions open to descendant classes. The classes implementing the interface correctly inherit the specifications. As a specification language, we use a combination of JML and permission-based separation logic, including abstract predicates. This results in an abstract, modular and natural way to specify the behaviour of concurrent queues. The specifications can be used to derive high-level properties about queues, for example to show that the order of elements is preserved. Moreover, the approach can be easily adapted to other concurrent data structures

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“…In another line of work, the focus is on developing practical techniques to reason about commonly used programs, using various synchronisation methods, support for dynamic thread creation, reentrant locks etc. This has been the focus of our work on the VerCors tool set [3][4][5]14], where we developed techniques (with tool support) to reason about multi-threaded Java and OpenCL programs. This is also the aim of the VeriFast tool, for verification of single-and multithreaded C and Java programs [39,65] and the Viper framework, which provides support for separation logic-based reasoning for a low-level intermediate language [43,51].…”

Section: Verification Of Concurrent Softwarementioning

confidence: 99%

Towards Reliable Concurrent Software

Huisman

Joosten

2018

Principled Software Development

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As the use of concurrent software is increasing, we urgently need techniques to establish the correctness of such applications. Over the last years, significant progress has been made in the area of software verification, making verification techniques usable for realistic applications. However, much of this work concentrates on sequential software, and a next step is necessary to apply these results also on realistic concurrent software. In this paper, we outline a research agenda to realise this goal. We argue that current techniques for verification of concurrent software need to be further developed in multiple directions: extending the class of properties that can be established, improving the level of automation that is available for this kind of verification, and enlarging the class of concurrent programs that can be verified.

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The VerCors project

Cited by 16 publications

References 53 publications

Formal Specifications for Java's Synchronisation Classes

Formal Specifications for Java's Synchronisation Classes

A History of BlockingQueues

Towards Reliable Concurrent Software

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