Nekara: Generalized Concurrency Testing

Agarwal, Udit; Deligiannis, Pantazis; Huang, Cheng; Jung, Kumseok; Lal, Akash; Naseer, Immad; Parkinson, Matthew; Thangamani, Arun; Vedurada, Jyothi; Xiao, Yanfeng

doi:10.1109/ase51524.2021.9678838

“…The instrumentation API takes inspiration from prior work [3] that demonstrated the generality of the API, even outside of C#, at capturing different programming models. Each worker created in the program must inform CTE when it is created (OnWorkerCreated), when it starts running (OnWorkerStarted), and when it completes (OnWorkerCompleted).…”

Section: Instrumentation Apimentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The selected worker is unblocked (rest all workers remain blocked) and is allowed to execute until it hits a scheduling point again, at which point control goes into the CTE and the process repeats. This design, of sequentializing workers to execute only one-at-a-time is fairly standard in CCT tools [3].…”

Section: Instrumentation Apimentioning

confidence: 99%

Industrial-Strength Controlled Concurrency Testing for $$\textsc {C}{} \texttt {\#} $$ Programs with $$\textsc {Coyote} $$

Deligiannis

¹

,

Senthilnathan

²

,

Nayyar

³

et al. 2023

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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2

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This paper describes the design and implementation of the open-source tool $$\textsc {Coyote} $$ C O Y O T E for testing concurrent programs written in the $$\textsc {C}{} \texttt {\#} $$ C # language. $$\textsc {Coyote} $$ C O Y O T E provides algorithmic capabilities to explore the state-space of interleavings of a concurrent program, with deterministic repro for any bug that it finds. $$\textsc {Coyote} $$ C O Y O T E encapsulates multiple ideas from the research community to offer state-of-the-art testing for $$\textsc {C}{} \texttt {\#} $$ C # programs, as well as an efficiently engineered implementation that has been shown robust enough to support industrial use.

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“…Moreover, controlled concurrency testing and stateless model checking are both actively and effectively applied techniques in the industry [34], [35]. To illustrate, Nekara [34] is an open-source library that facilitates the development of systematic testing solutions for multiple platforms.…”

Section: Data Racesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Moreover, controlled concurrency testing and stateless model checking are both actively and effectively applied techniques in the industry [34], [35]. To illustrate, Nekara [34] is an open-source library that facilitates the development of systematic testing solutions for multiple platforms. It provides an API to model the set of supported concurrency primitives, and encapsulates state-of-the-art search heuristics to explore the interleaving space from existing frameworks (e.g., in a randomized fashion, or focusing on schedules with limited context switches).…”

Section: Data Racesmentioning

confidence: 99%

When Memory Corruption Met Concurrency: Vulnerabilities in Concurrent Programs

Llorente-Vazquez

¹

,

Santos-Grueiro

²

,

Bringas

³

2023

IEEE Access

1

0

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Concurrent programs are widespread in modern systems. They make better use of processor resources but inevitably introduce a new set of problems in terms of reliability and security. Concurrency bugs usually lead to program crashes and unexpected behavior, and are an active research topic. From a security perspective, concurrency vulnerabilities are those that exhibit harmful behavior exclusively in concurrent executions. They can take place in a diverse range of environments, such as in operating system kernels, file system operations, or general-purpose multithreaded programs. A particular characteristic of concurrency is that it not only introduces new problems, but also enables traditional vulnerabilities to be triggered in concurrent-specific ways. Those that lead to dangerous security vulnerabilities usually cause memory corruption, a strong and flexible primitive for exploitation, and are known as concurrency memory corruption vulnerabilities. In this paper, we systematically analyze concurrency vulnerabilities in C and C++ programs, their exploitation and their detection, focusing on concurrency memory corruption vulnerabilities. We organize previous work on concurrency bug characteristics and detection, and highlight the differences in relation to vulnerabilities. Then, we examine the existence of concurrency vulnerabilities in real-world programs by searching the CVE database and point out a growing trend. Further, we analyze and compare existing detection approaches towards concurrency memory corruption.

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