Process-Local Static Analysis of Synchronous Processes

Abstract

We develop a modular approach to statically analyse imperative processes communicating by synchronous message passing. The approach is modular in that it only needs to analyze one process at a time, but will in general have to do so repeatedly. The approach combines lattice-valued regular expressions to capture network communication with a dedicated shuffle operator for composing individual process analysis results. We present both a soundness proof and a prototype implementation of the approach for a synchronous subset of the Go programming language. Overall our approach tackles the combinatorial explosion of concurrent programs by suitable static analysis approximations, thereby lifting traditional sequential analysis techniques to a concurrent setting.

GoDetector: Detecting Concurrent Bug in Go

“…Stadtmuller et al proposed another static verification method [19] to detect the global deadlock using forkable regular expressions. Lange et al [20][21] proposed two more advanced static verification frameworks (Gong and Godel), which extracted behavioral types [22] from source code's SSA intermediate representation, to check the program's liveness and safety properties by using bounded execution in [20] and the exhaustive model checking in [21], the model checking tool mcrl2 [23] and the termination detection tool KITTeL [24] are used to implement the corresponding function; Midtgaard et al [25] proposed a static verification method abstract interpretation to detect global deadlocks in a limited subset of the Go program. Sulzmann and Stadtmuller attempted to solve the problem of dynamic verification of Go programs by proposing a track-based method to analyze Go programs that only use the synchronous channel in [26]; then they introduced an improved method that supports asynchronous channels and relies on vector clocks in [27].…”

Bounded verification of message-passing concurrency in Go using Promela and Spin

“…Virtual method calls (on interfaces) are particularly difficult to model. As in [7,8,10,12,14], we do not support channel passing (since we abstract away the data sent over channels). We note that our empirical survey [3] found that only 6% of projects used channels that carry channels.…”

“…Also, Zaks and Joshi [19] use Spin to verify multi-threaded C programs using their LLVM representation and custom virtual machine. Several works focus on the verification of message-passing concurrency in Go [7,8,10,12,14,15,16]. Four papers studied static verification using behavioural models.…”

An Empirical Study of Messaging Passing Concurrency in Go Projects

“…Various safety and liveness properties can be checked on behavioural types using bounded executions in [11] and exhaustive model checking in [12]. Midtgaard et al [16] proposed a static verification approach based on abstract interpretation for detecting global deadlocks in a small subset of Go (without recursion). Sulzmann and Stadtmüller [26], [27] addressed the dynamic verification of Go programs.…”

“…Unsurprisingly, the static approaches mentioned above only provide partial support of the Go language. For instance, none of the static verification frameworks in [12], [16], [19], [25] can verify programs that spawn new threads within a for loop. The work in [11] only provides an unsound approximation for such programs.…”