research-article

Predicate abstraction and refinement for verifying multi-threaded programs

Authors:

Ashutosh Gupta,

Corneliu Popeea,

Andrey RybalchenkoAuthors Info & Claims

POPL '11: Proceedings of the 38th annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages

Pages 331 - 344

https://doi.org/10.1145/1926385.1926424

Published: 26 January 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Automated verification of multi-threaded programs requires explicit identification of the interplay between interacting threads, so-called environment transitions, to enable scalable, compositional reasoning. Once the environment transitions are identified, we can prove program properties by considering each program thread in isolation, as the environment transitions keep track of the interleaving with other threads. Finding adequate environment transitions that are sufficiently precise to yield conclusive results and yet do not overwhelm the verifier with unnecessary details about the interleaving with other threads is a major challenge. In this paper we propose a method for safety verification of multi-threaded programs that applies (transition) predicate abstraction-based discovery of environment transitions, exposing a minimal amount of information about the thread interleaving. The crux of our method is an abstraction refinement procedure that uses recursion-free Horn clauses to declaratively state abstraction refinement queries. Then, the queries are resolved by a corresponding constraint solving algorithm. We present preliminary experimental results for mutual exclusion protocols and multi-threaded device drivers.

Supplementary Material

MP4 File (31-mpeg-4.mp4)

Download
280.22 MB

References

[1]

Y. Bar-David and G. Taubenfeld. Automatic discovery of mutual exclusion algorithms. In DISC, pages 136--150, 2003.

Digital Library

[2]

G. Basler, M. Mazzucchi, T. Wahl, and D. Kroening. Symbolic counter abstraction for concurrent software. In CAV, pages 64--78, 2009.

Digital Library

[3]

G. Basler, M. Hague, D. Kroening, C.-H. L. Ong, T. Wahl, and H. Zhao. Boom: Taking boolean program model checking one step further. In TACAS, pages 145--149, 2010.

Digital Library

[4]

E. M. Clarke, O. Grumberg, S. Jha, Y. Lu, and H. Veith. Counterexample-guided abstraction refinement. In CAV, pages 154--169, 2000.

Digital Library

[5]

A. Cohen and K. S. Namjoshi. Local proofs for global safety properties. FMSD, 34 (2): 104--125, 2009.

Digital Library

[6]

J. Corbet, A. Rubini, and G. Kroah-Hartman. Linux Device Drivers, 3rd Edition. O'Reilly Media, Inc., 2005.

Digital Library

[7]

P. Cousot and R. Cousot. Abstract interpretation: A unified lattice model for static analysis of programs by construction or approximation of fixpoints. In POPL, pages 238--252, 1977.

Digital Library

[8]

C. Flanagan and P. Godefroid. Dynamic partial-order reduction for model checking software. In POPL, pages 110--121, 2005.

Digital Library

[9]

C. Flanagan and S. Qadeer. Thread-modular model checking. In SPIN, pages 213--224, 2003.

Digital Library

[10]

C. Flanagan, S. N. Freund, and S. Qadeer. Thread-modular verification for shared-memory programs. In ESOP, pages 262--277, 2002.

Digital Library

[11]

P. Godefroid. Partial-Order Methods for the Verification of Concurrent Systems - An Approach to the State-Explosion Problem. PhD thesis, University of Liege, Computer Science Department, 1994.

[12]

S. Graf and H. Saıdi. Construction of abstract state graphs with PVS. In CAV, pages 72--83, 1997.

Digital Library

[13]

A. Gupta, C. Popeea, and A. Rybalchenko. Non-monotonic refinement of control abstraction for concurrent programs. In phATVA, pages 188--202, 2010.

Digital Library

[14]

T. A. Henzinger, R. Jhala, R. Majumdar, and G. Sutre. Lazy abstraction. In POPL, pages 58--70, 2002.

Digital Library

[15]

T. A. Henzinger, R. Jhala, and R. Majumdar. Race checking by context inference. In PLDI, pages 1--13, 2004.

Digital Library

[16]

C. B. Jones. Tentative steps toward a development method for interfering programs. ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst., 5 (4): 596--619, 1983.

Digital Library

[17]

C. B. Jones. Specification and design of (parallel) programs. In IFIP Congress, pages 321--332, 1983.

[18]

L. Lamport. A new solution of Dijkstra's concurrent programming problem. Commun. ACM, 17 (8): 453--455, 1974.

Digital Library

[19]

L. Lamport. A fast mutual exclusion algorithm. ACM Trans. Comput. Syst., 5 (1): 1--11, 1987.

Digital Library

[20]

S. Lu, S. Park, E. Seo, and Y. Zhou. Learning from mistakes: a comprehensive study on real world concurrency bug characteristics. In ASPLOS, pages 329--339, 2008.

Digital Library

[21]

A. Malkis, A. Podelski, and A. Rybalchenko. Thread-modular verification is cartesian abstract interpretation. In ICTAC, pages 183--197, 2006.

Digital Library

[22]

Z. Manna and A. Pnueli. Temporal verification of reactive systems: safety. Springer-Verlag, 1995.

Digital Library

[23]

P. McKenney. Using Promela and Spin to verify parallel algorithms. LWN.net weekly edition, 2007.

[24]

M. Musuvathi, S. Qadeer, T. Ball, G. Basler, P. A. Nainar, and I. Neamtiu. Finding and reproducing Heisenbugs in concurrent programs. In OSDI, pages 267--280, 2008.

Digital Library

[25]

G. C. Necula, S. McPeak, S. P. Rahul, and W. Weimer. CIL: Intermediate language and tools for analysis and transformation of C programs. In CC, pages 213--228, 2002.

Digital Library

[26]

S. S. Owicki and D. Gries. An axiomatic proof technique for parallel programs I. Acta Inf., 6: 319--340, 1976.

Digital Library

[27]

A. Pnueli, J. Xu, and L. D. Zuck. Liveness with (0, 1, infty)-counter abstraction. In CAV, pages 107--122, 2002.

Digital Library

[28]

A. Podelski and A. Rybalchenko. Transition predicate abstraction and fair termination. In POPL, pages 132--144, 2005.

Digital Library

[29]

A. Podelski and A. Rybalchenko. Armc: The logical choice for software model checking with abstraction refinement. In PADL, pages 245--259, 2007.

Digital Library

[30]

S. Qadeer and D. Wu. KISS: keep it simple and sequential. In PLDI, pages 14--24, 2004.

Digital Library

[31]

A. Rybalchenko. The ARMC tool. Available from http://www7.in.tum.de/ rybal/armc/.

[32]

B. K. Szymanski. A simple solution to Lamport's concurrent programming problem with linear wait. In ICS, pages 621--626, 1988.

Digital Library

[33]

The Intelligent Systems Laboratory. SICStus Prolog User's Manual. Swedish Institute of Computer Science, 2001. Release 3.8.7.

[34]

C. Wang, Z. Yang, V. Kahlon, and A. Gupta. Peephole partial order reduction. In TACAS, pages 382--396, 2008.

Digital Library

Cited By

Fan HSun ZHe F(2023)Satisfiability Modulo Ordering Consistency Theory for SC, TSO, and PSO Memory ModelsACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems10.1145/357983545:1(1-37)Online publication date: 3-Mar-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3579835
Fan HLiu WHe FLee JAgrawal KSpear M(2022)Interference relation-guided SMT solving for multi-threaded program verificationProceedings of the 27th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming10.1145/3503221.3508424(163-176)Online publication date: 2-Apr-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3503221.3508424
He FSun ZFan HFreund SYahav E(2021)Satisfiability modulo ordering consistency theory for multi-threaded program verificationProceedings of the 42nd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation10.1145/3453483.3454108(1264-1279)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3453483.3454108
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Predicate abstraction and refinement for verifying multi-threaded programs

Recommendations

Predicate abstraction and refinement for verifying multi-threaded programs
POPL '11

Automated verification of multi-threaded programs requires explicit identification of the interplay between interacting threads, so-called environment transitions, to enable scalable, compositional reasoning. Once the environment transitions are ...
A counterexample guided abstraction refinement framework for verifying concurrent c programs
SAT-based Abstraction Refinement for Real-time Systems

In this paper, we present an abstraction refinement approach for model checking safety properties of real-time systems using SAT-solving. We present a faithful embedding of bounded model checking for systems of timed automata into propositional logic ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

POPL '11: Proceedings of the 38th annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages

January 2011

652 pages

ISBN:9781450304900

DOI:10.1145/1926385

General Chair:
Thomas Ball
Microsoft Research, USA
,
Program Chair:
Mooly Sagiv
Tel Aviv University, Israel

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 46, Issue 1
POPL '11
January 2011
624 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/1925844
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2011 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

SIGPLAN: ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages

In-Cooperation

SIGACT: ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 26 January 2011

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

POPL '11

Sponsor:

SIGPLAN

POPL '11: The 38th Annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages

January 26 - 28, 2011

Texas, Austin, USA

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 860 of 4,328 submissions, 20%

Upcoming Conference

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

95
Total Citations
View Citations
907
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)50
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)7

Reflects downloads up to 05 Mar 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Fan HSun ZHe F(2023)Satisfiability Modulo Ordering Consistency Theory for SC, TSO, and PSO Memory ModelsACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems10.1145/357983545:1(1-37)Online publication date: 3-Mar-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3579835
Fan HLiu WHe FLee JAgrawal KSpear M(2022)Interference relation-guided SMT solving for multi-threaded program verificationProceedings of the 27th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming10.1145/3503221.3508424(163-176)Online publication date: 2-Apr-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3503221.3508424
He FSun ZFan HFreund SYahav E(2021)Satisfiability modulo ordering consistency theory for multi-threaded program verificationProceedings of the 42nd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation10.1145/3453483.3454108(1264-1279)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3453483.3454108
Dietsch DHeizmann MKlumpp DNaouar MPodelski ASchätzle C(2021)Verification of Concurrent Programs Using Petri Net UnfoldingsVerification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation10.1007/978-3-030-67067-2_9(174-195)Online publication date: 12-Jan-2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67067-2_9
Yin LDong WLiu WWang J(2020)On Scheduling Constraint Abstraction for Multi-Threaded Program VerificationIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2018.286412246:5(549-565)Online publication date: 1-May-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2018.2864122
Yamane S(2019)Deductive Verification Method of Real-Time Safety Properties for Embedded Assembly ProgramsElectronics10.3390/electronics81011638:10(1163)Online publication date: 14-Oct-2019
https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics8101163
Yin LDong WLiu WWang JHuchard MKästner CFraser G(2018)Scheduling constraint based abstraction refinement for weak memory modelsProceedings of the 33rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1145/3238147.3238223(645-655)Online publication date: 3-Sep-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3238147.3238223
Zhang FZhao YSanán DLiu YTiu ALin SSun J(2018)Compositional Reasoning for Shared-Variable Concurrent ProgramsFormal Methods10.1007/978-3-319-95582-7_31(523-541)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2018
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95582-7_31
Liang LMelham TKroening DSchrammel PTautschnig M(2017)Effective Verification for Low-Level Software with Competing InterruptsACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems10.1145/314743217:2(1-26)Online publication date: 7-Dec-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3147432
Berman LGallagher KKozaitis S(2017)Evaluating the Use of Sound in Static Program ComprehensionACM Transactions on Applied Perception10.1145/312945615:1(1-20)Online publication date: 6-Oct-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3129456
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten