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A General Approach to Under-Approximate Reasoning About Concurrent Programs

Authors Azalea Raad , Julien Vanegue, Josh Berdine, Peter O'Hearn

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ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Separation logic
  • Theory of computation → Programming logic
  • Theory of computation → Program analysis
  • Security and privacy → Logic and verification
Keywords
  • Under-approximate reasoning
  • incorrectness logic
  • bug detection
  • software exploits
  • separation logic

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Abstract

There is a large body of work on concurrent reasoning including Rely-Guarantee (RG) and Concurrent Separation Logics. These theories are over-approximate: a proof identifies a superset of program behaviours and thus implies the absence of certain bugs. However, failure to find a proof does not imply their presence (leading to false positives in over-approximate tools). We describe a general theory of under-approximate reasoning for concurrency. Our theory incorporates ideas from Concurrent Incorrectness Separation Logic and RG based on a subset rather than a superset of interleavings. A strong motivation of our work is detecting software exploits; we do this by developing concurrent adversarial separation logic (CASL), and use CASL to detect information disclosure attacks that uncover sensitive data (e.g. passwords) and out-of-bounds attacks that corrupt data. We also illustrate our approach with classic concurrency idioms that go beyond prior under-approximate theories which we believe can inform the design of future concurrent bug detection tools.

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Azalea Raad, Julien Vanegue, Josh Berdine, and Peter O'Hearn. A General Approach to Under-Approximate Reasoning About Concurrent Programs. In 34th International Conference on Concurrency Theory (CONCUR 2023). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 279, pp. 25:1-25:17, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2023) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.CONCUR.2023.25

Author Details

Azalea Raad
  • Imperial College London, UK
Julien Vanegue
  • Bloomberg, New York, NY, USA
Josh Berdine
  • Skiplabs, London, UK
Peter O'Hearn
  • University College London, UK
  • Lacework, London, UK

Funding

  • Raad, Azalea: UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship under grant number MR/V024299/1

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