Verification Of Sequential And Concurrent Programs

This book provides a structured introduction to the verification of sequen tial and concurrent programs. It thus belongs to the area of programming languages but at the same time it is firmly based on mathematical logic. In logic one usually studies fixed syntactic or semantic objects. This is not necessarily the case in the area of program verification. The objects studied here, namely programs, do not have a standard syntax, their semantics can be defined in many different ways, and several approaches to their verification can be contemplated. These differences lead to various difficult design decisions. Even though we restrict our attention here to one programming style - imperative pro gramming - we are still confronted with a veritable cornucopia of pro gramming constructs from which an appropriate selection has to be made. Having studied some of these constructs separately does not yet imply that we understand their combined effect.

HIS BOOK CONTAINS a most comprehensive text that presents syntax-directed and compositional methods for the formal veri?- T cation of programs. The approach is not language-bounded in the sense that it covers a large variety of programming models and features that appear in most modern programming languages. It covers the classes of - quential and parallel, deterministic and non-deterministic, distributed and object-oriented programs. For each of the classes it presents the various c- teria of correctness that are relevant for these classes, such as interference freedom, deadlock freedom, and appropriate notions of liveness for parallel programs. Also, special proof rules appropriate for each class of programs are presented. In spite of this diversity due to the rich program classes cons- ered, there exist a uniform underlying theory of veri?cation which is synt- oriented and promotes compositional approaches to veri?cation, leading to scalability of the methods. The text strikes the proper balance between mathematical rigor and - dactic introduction of increasingly complex rules in an incremental manner, adequately supported by state-of-the-art examples. As a result it can serve as a textbook for a variety of courses on di?erent levels and varying durations. It can also serve as a reference book for researchers in the theory of veri?- tion, in particular since it contains much material that never before appeared in book form. This is specially true for the treatment of object-oriented p- grams which is entirely novel and is strikingly elegant.

Software -- Software Engineering.

An advanced 2001 textbook on verification of concurrent programs using a semantic approach which highlights concepts clearly.

There is currently an increasing demand for concurrent programs. Checking the correctness of concurrent programs is a complex task due to the interleavings of processes. Sometimes, violation of the correctness properties in such systems causes human or resource losses; therefore, it is crucial to check the correctness of such systems. Two main approaches to software analysis are testing and formal verification. Testing can help discover many bugs at a low cost. However, it cannot prove the correctness of a program. Formal verification, on the other hand, is the approach for proving program correctness. Model checking is a formal verification technique that is suitable for concurrent programs. It aims to automatically establish the correctness (expressed in terms of temporal properties) of a program through an exhaustive search of the behavior of the system. Model checking was initially introduced for the purpose of verifying finite‐state concurrent programs, and extending it to infinite‐state systems is an active research area. In this thesis, we focus on the formal verification of parameterized systems. That is, systems in which the number of executing processes is not bounded a priori. We provide fully-automatic and parameterized model checking techniques for establishing the correctness of safety properties for certain classes of concurrent programs. We provide an open‐source prototype for every technique and present our experimental results on several benchmarks. First, we address the problem of automatically checking safety properties for bounded as well as parameterized phaser programs. Phaser programs are concurrent programs that make use of the complex synchronization construct of Habanero Java phasers. For the bounded case, we establish the decidability of checking the violation of program assertions and the undecidability of checking deadlock‐freedom. For the parameterized case, we study different formulations of the verification problem and propose an exact procedure that is guaranteed to terminate for some reachability problems even in the presence of unbounded phases and arbitrarily many spawned processes. Second, we propose an approach for automatic verification of parameterized concurrent programs in which shared variables are manipulated by atomic transitions to count and synchronize the spawned processes. For this purpose, we introduce counting predicates that related counters that refer to the number of processes satisfying some given properties to the variables that are directly manipulated by the concurrent processes. We then combine existing works on the counter, predicate, and constrained monotonic abstraction and build a nested counterexample‐based refinement scheme to establish correctness. Third, we introduce Lazy Constrained Monotonic Abstraction for more efficient exploration of well‐structured abstractions of infinite‐state non‐monotonic systems. We propose several heuristics and assess the efficiency of the proposed technique by extensive experiments using our open‐source prototype. Lastly, we propose a sound but (in general) incomplete procedure for automatic verification of safety properties for a class of fault‐tolerant distributed protocols described in the Heard‐Of (HO for short) model. The HO model is a popular model for describing distributed protocols. We propose a verification procedure that is guaranteed to terminate even for unbounded number of the processes that execute the distributed protocol.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Computer Aided Verification, CAV 2009, held in Grenoble, France, in June/July 2009. The 36 revised full papers presented together with 16 tool papers and 4 invited talks and 4 invited tutorials were carefully reviewed and selected from 135 regular paper and 34 tool paper submissions. The papers are dedicated to the advancement of the theory and practice of computer-aided formal analysis methods for hardware and software systems; their scope ranges from theoretical results to concrete applications, with an emphasis on practical verification tools and the underlying algorithms and techniques.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Symposium on Automated Technology for Verification and Analysis, ATVA 2018, held in Los Angeles, CA, USA in October 2018. The 27 full papers presented together with 5 short papers and 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 82 submissions. The symposium is dedicated to the promotion of research on theoretical and practical aspects of automated analysis, verification and synthesis by providing a forum for interaction between the regional and the international research communities and industry in the field.