Brief Announcement: MP-State: State-Aware Software Model Checking of Message-Passing Systems

Abstract

Software model checking [4] is a useful and practical branch of verification for verifying the implementation of the system. The wide usability comes at a price of low time and space efficiency. In fact, model checking of even simple single-process programs can take several hours using state-of-the-art techniques [6]. Verification complexity gets even worse for concurrent programs that simultaneously execute loosely coupled processes. Verification efficiency can be greatly improved by capturing the state of the program, a technique generally referred to as stateful model checking [2]. Intuitively, state capture enables to detect that two states are identical and, therefore, to consider only a representative state for verification. Unfortunately, capturing the state in general software systems can be very hard, even if the entire state of the system resides in the (local) memory. As a result, certain verification approaches (commonly called stateless model checking) do not capture the system’s state at all [4]. Stateful model checking is in principle possible for software, however, at a price of considerable overhead. Therefore, stateful model checking is efficient only if the achieved reduction of redundantly explored states compensate for the overhead.