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Abstract Threads

  • Conference paper
Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation (VMCAI 2010)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 5944))

Abstract

Verification of large multithreaded programs is challenging. Automatic approaches cannot overcome the state explosion in the number of threads; semi-automatic methods require expensive human time for finding global inductive invariants. Ideally, automatic methods should not deal with the composition of the original threads and a human should not supply a global invariant. We provide such an approach. In our approach, a human supplies a specification of each thread in the program. Here he has the freedom to ignore or to use the knowledge about the other threads. The checks whether specifications of threads are sound as well as whether the composition of the specifications is error-free are handed over to the off-the-shelf verifiers. We show how to apply this divide-and-conquer approach for the interleaving semantics with shared variables communication where specifications are targeted to real-world programmers: a specification of a thread is simply another thread. The new approach extends thread-modular reasoning by relaxing the structure of the transition relation of a specification. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach by verifying two protocols governing the teardown of important data structures in Windows device drivers.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. MSR Redmond,  

    Shuvendu K. Lahiri & Shaz Qadeer

  2. University of Freiburg,  

    Alexander Malkis

Authors
  1. Shuvendu K. Lahiri
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  2. Alexander Malkis
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  3. Shaz Qadeer
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Facultad de Informatica (UPM), IMDEA Software, Campus Montegancedo, 28660 Boadilla del Monte, Madrid, Spain

    Gilles Barthe

  2. Facultad de Informatica (UPM), IMDEA Software and Technical University of Madrid, Campus Montegancedo, 28660 Boadilla del Monte, Madrid, Spain

    Manuel Hermenegildo

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Lahiri, S.K., Malkis, A., Qadeer, S. (2010). Abstract Threads. In: Barthe, G., Hermenegildo, M. (eds) Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation. VMCAI 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5944. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-11319-2_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-11319-2_18

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-11318-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-11319-2

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