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Concolic Unbounded-Thread Reachability via Loop Summaries

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Formal Methods and Software Engineering (ICFEM 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 10009))

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Abstract

We present a method for accelerating explicit-state backward search algorithms for systems of arbitrarily many finite-state threads. Our method statically analyzes the program executed by the threads for the existence of simple loops. We show how such loops can be collapsed without approximation into Presburger arithmetic constraints that symbolically summarize the effect of executing the backward search algorithm along the loop in the multi-threaded program. As a result, the subsequent explicit-state search does not need to explore the summarized part of the state space. The combination of concrete and symbolic exploration gives our algorithm a concolic flavor. We demonstrate the power of this method for proving and refuting safety properties of unbounded-thread programs.

This work is supported by US National Science Foundation grant no. 1253331.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Dynamic thread creation is discussed at end of Sect. 6.

  2. 2.

    Simple SCC nodes (representing a simple loop) are not to be confused with trivial SCC nodes (representing a single node). Simple nodes are by definition non-trivial.

  3. 3.

    We exploit the fact that cover preimages in systems induced by TTDs increase the number of threads in a state by at most 1 (see [20, Lemma 1] for a proof).

  4. 4.

    Loop-free paths (\(m=0\)) can be processed either using Algorithm 1, or via summaries.

  5. 5.

    Cutr “=” Concolic Unbounded-Thread Reachability analysis.

  6. 6.

    Webpage: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/lpzun/cutr.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Northeastern University, Boston, USA

    Peizun Liu & Thomas Wahl

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  1. Peizun Liu
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  2. Thomas Wahl
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Correspondence to Peizun Liu .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Science, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST), Nomi, Japan

    Kazuhiro Ogata

  2. Department of Computing and Software, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

    Mark Lawford

  3. Department of Computer Science, Hosei University, Tokyo, Japan

    Shaoying Liu

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Liu, P., Wahl, T. (2016). Concolic Unbounded-Thread Reachability via Loop Summaries. In: Ogata, K., Lawford, M., Liu, S. (eds) Formal Methods and Software Engineering. ICFEM 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10009. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47846-3_22

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47846-3_22

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