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Context-Bounded Analysis of Concurrent Programs (Invited Talk)

Authors Pascal Baumann , Moses Ganardi , Rupak Majumdar , Ramanathan S. Thinniyam , Georg Zetzsche

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Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Concurrency
  • Software and its engineering → Software verification
Keywords
  • Context-bounded analysis
  • Multi-threaded programs
  • Decidability

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Abstract

Context-bounded analysis of concurrent programs is a technique to compute a sequence of under-approximations of all behaviors of the program. For a fixed bound k, a context bounded analysis considers only those runs in which a single process is interrupted at most k times. As k grows, we capture more and more behaviors of the program. Practically, context-bounding has been very effective as a bug-finding tool: many bugs can be found even with small bounds. Theoretically, context-bounded analysis is decidable for a large number of programming models for which verification problems are undecidable. In this paper, we survey some recent work in context-bounded analysis of multithreaded programs.
In particular, we show a general decidability result. We study context-bounded reachability in a language-theoretic setup. We fix a class of languages (satisfying some mild conditions) from which each thread is chosen. We show context-bounded safety and termination verification problems are decidable iff emptiness is decidable for the underlying class of languages and context-bounded boundedness is decidable iff finiteness is decidable for the underlying class.

Cite As Get BibTex

Pascal Baumann, Moses Ganardi, Rupak Majumdar, Ramanathan S. Thinniyam, and Georg Zetzsche. Context-Bounded Analysis of Concurrent Programs (Invited Talk). In 50th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2023). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 261, pp. 3:1-3:16, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2023) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2023.3

Author Details

Pascal Baumann
  • Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS), Kaiserslautern, Germany
Moses Ganardi
  • Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS), Kaiserslautern, Germany
Rupak Majumdar
  • Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS), Kaiserslautern, Germany
Ramanathan S. Thinniyam
  • Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS), Kaiserslautern, Germany
Georg Zetzsche
  • Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS), Kaiserslautern, Germany

Funding

This research was partially funded by the DFG project 389792660 TRR 248-CPEC and by the European Union (ERC, FINABIS, 101077902). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

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