Automated Verification of Go Programs via Bounded Model Checking

Abstract

The Go programming language offers a wide range of primitives to coordinate lightweight threads, e.g., channels, waitgroups, and mutexes -all of which may cause concurrency bugs. Static checkers that guarantee the absence of bugs are essential to help programmers avoid these costly errors before their code is executed. However existing tools either miss too many bugs or cannot handle large programs. To address these limitations, we propose a static checker for Go programs which relies on performing bounded model checking of their concurrent behaviours. In contrast to previous works, our approach deals with large codebases, supports programs that have statically unknown parameters, and is extensible to additional concurrency primitives. Our work includes a detailed presentation of the extraction algorithm from Go programs to models, an algorithm to automatically check programs with statically unknown parameters, and a large scale evaluation of our approach. The latter shows that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art. 1 func preload(trees []string, n int) { 2 ch := make(chan string, n) // new chan with capacity n 3 limitCh := make(chan int, runtime.NumCPU()) 4 for i := 0; i < runtime.NumCPU(); i++ { 5 limitCh <-1 // send token on chan limitCh 6 } 7 var wg sync.WaitGroup 8 for _, t := range trees { 9 wg.Add(1) // increment wg counter 10 go func(v string) { // spawn goroutine 11 <-limitCh // receive token before starting work 12 s := DoSomeWork(v) 13 ch <-s 14 limitCh <-1 // return token 15 wg.Done() // decrement wg counter 16 }(t) 17 } 18 go func() { // spawn goroutine 19 wg.Wait() // wait for wg to reach 0 20 close(ch) // set ch to closed 21 }() 22 for s := range ch { // receive message from ch 23 if IsError(s) { 24

kmclib: Automated Inference and Verification of Session Types

“…Our work is reminiscent of automated software model checking which has a long history (see [9] for a survey). There are few works on inference and verification of behavioural types, i.e., [18,11,12,3]. However, Perera et al [18] only present a prototype research language, while Lange et al [11,12,3] propose verification procedures for Go programs that rely on external tools which are not integrated with the language nor its type system.…”

“…There are few works on inference and verification of behavioural types, i.e., [18,11,12,3]. However, Perera et al [18] only present a prototype research language, while Lange et al [11,12,3] propose verification procedures for Go programs that rely on external tools which are not integrated with the language nor its type system. To our knowledge, ours is the first implementation of type inference for MPST and the first integration of session types compatibility checking within a programming language.…”

Model checking programs in process-oriented IEC 61131-3 Structured Text

“…В работах [18,19] Дилли и Ланге предлагают подход Gomela проверки программ на подмножестве языка Go путем генерации соответствующего кода на Promela. Проверяется корректность функций передачи сообщений.…”

Untitled

“…Thus, it may be better to try to verify the existing Golang programs by transforming them into formal models and then applying formal methods to them. Further plans include learning more about the GOMELA tool ( [6] and [8]) and either contributing to it or developing an alternative. Another possible direction of future work is to join the investigations at the Cyber-Physical Systems Laboratory of the Institute of Automation and Electrometry [14].…”

“…Nicolas Dilley and Julien Lange applied this approach: they chose a fragment of the Go language, named it MiniGo, and developed a GOMELA tool [6,7] to translate MiniGo programs into Promela specifications. Later, they evolved it into a tool-chain for an automated verification of Go programs [8,9].…”