Publication detail

An Integrated Specification and Verification Technique for Highly Concurrent Data Structures

HOLÍK, L. ABDULLA, P. HAZIZA, F. JONSSON, B. REZINE, A.

Original Title

An Integrated Specification and Verification Technique for Highly Concurrent Data Structures

Type

article in a collection out of WoS and Scopus

Language

English

Original Abstract

We present a technique for automatically verifying safety properties of concurrent programs, in particular programs which 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 infinite-state 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. We have implemented our method and used it to verify programs, some of which have not been verified by any other automatic method before.

Keywords

verification, specification, concurrency, parallelism, lock-free data structures, automata, data independence, thread modular, precision

Authors

HOLÍK, L.; ABDULLA, P.; HAZIZA, F.; JONSSON, B.; REZINE, A.

RIV year

2013

Released

3. 10. 2013

Publisher

Springer Verlag

Location

Berlin Heidelberg

ISBN

978-3-642-36742-7

Book

19th International Conference, TACAS 2013

Edition

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

ISBN

0302-9743

Periodical

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

Year of study

7795

Number

0000

State

Federal Republic of Germany

Pages from

324

Pages to

338

Pages count

15

URL

http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-36742-7_23

BibTex

@inproceedings{BUT103444,
  author="Lukáš {Holík} and Parosh {Abdulla} and Frédéric {Haziza} and Bengt {Jonsson} and Ahmed {Rezine}",
  title="An Integrated Specification and Verification Technique for Highly Concurrent Data Structures",
  booktitle="19th International Conference, TACAS 2013",
  year="2013",
  series="Lecture Notes in Computer Science",
  journal="Lecture Notes in Computer Science",
  volume="7795",
  number="0000",
  pages="324--338",
  publisher="Springer Verlag",
  address="Berlin Heidelberg",
  isbn="978-3-642-36742-7",
  issn="0302-9743",
  url="http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-36742-7_23"
}