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Automatic Verification of Erlang-Style Concurrency

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Book cover Static Analysis (SAS 2013)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 7935))

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Abstract

This paper presents an approach to verify safety properties of Erlang-style, higher-order concurrent programs automatically. Inspired by Core Erlang, we introduce λ Actor, a prototypical functional language with pattern-matching algebraic data types, augmented with process creation and asynchronous message-passing primitives. We formalise an abstract model of λ Actor programs called Actor Communicating System (ACS) which has a natural interpretation as a vector addition system, for which some verification problems are decidable. We give a parametric abstract interpretation framework for λ Actor and use it to build a polytime computable, flow-based, abstract semantics of λ Actor programs, which we then use to bootstrap the ACS construction, thus deriving a more accurate abstract model of the input program.

We evaluate the method which we implemented in the prototype Soter. We find that in practice our abstraction technique is accurate enough to verify an interesting range of safety properties. Though the ACS coverability problem is Expspace-complete, Soter can analyse non-trivial programs in a matter of seconds.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Oxford, UK

    Emanuele D’Osualdo, Jonathan Kochems & C. -H. Luke Ong

Authors
  1. Emanuele D’Osualdo
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  2. Jonathan Kochems
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  3. C. -H. Luke Ong
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Microsoft Research, One Microsoft Way, 98052, Redmond, WA, USA

    Francesco Logozzo

  2. One Microsoft Way, Microsoft Research, 98052, Redmond,, WA,, USA

    Manuel Fähndrich

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D’Osualdo, E., Kochems, J., Ong, C.H.L. (2013). Automatic Verification of Erlang-Style Concurrency. In: Logozzo, F., Fähndrich, M. (eds) Static Analysis. SAS 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7935. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38856-9_24

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38856-9_24

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-38855-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-38856-9

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