On Deductive Verification of an Industrial Concurrent Software Component with VerCors

Abstract

This paper presents a case study where a concurrent module of a tunnel control system written in Java is verified for memory safety and data race freedom using VerCors, a software verification tool. This case study was carried out in close collaboration with our industrial partner Technolution, which is in charge of developing the tunnel control software. First, we describe the process of preparing the code for verification, and how we make use of the different capabilities of VerCors to successfully verify the module. The concurrent module has gone through a rigorous process of design, code reviewing and unit and integration testing. Despite this careful approach, VerCors found two memory related bugs. We describe these bugs, and show how VerCors could have found them during the development process. Second, we wanted to communicate back our results and verification process to the engineers of Technolution. We discuss how we prepared our presentation, and the explanation we settled on. Third, we present interesting feedback points from this presentation. We use this feedback to determine future work directions with the goal to improve our tool support, and to bridge the gap between formal methods and industry.

Verification and Validation of Concurrent and Distributed Heterogeneous Systems (Track Summary)

“…In On Deductive Verification of an Industrial Concurrent Software Component with VerCors [13], the authors Raúl E. Monti, Robert Rubbens, and Marieke Huisman present their experience with verifying memory safety and data race freedom in an industrial case study of a concurrent module of a tunnel control system written in Java. The employed tool is VerCors, a software verification tool that requires annotating the code before carrying out verification.…”

Multiparty Session Typing in Java, Deductively

“…Instead of building a new static analyser from scratch, we leverage a state-of-theart deductive verifier for Java, namely VerCors [2]. Under active development for years, VerCors has been used in industrial case studies, too [26,18,30]. We note that our approach is generic, though, while our current tool is VerCors-specific.…”