28,543 research outputs found
A Denotational Semantics for Communicating Unstructured Code
An important property of programming language semantics is that they should
be compositional. However, unstructured low-level code contains goto-like
commands making it hard to define a semantics that is compositional. In this
paper, we follow the ideas of Saabas and Uustalu to structure low-level code.
This gives us the possibility to define a compositional denotational semantics
based on least fixed points to allow for the use of inductive verification
methods. We capture the semantics of communication using finite traces similar
to the denotations of CSP. In addition, we examine properties of this semantics
and give an example that demonstrates reasoning about communication and jumps.
With this semantics, we lay the foundations for a proof calculus that captures
both, the semantics of unstructured low-level code and communication.Comment: In Proceedings FESCA 2015, arXiv:1503.0437
Reachability of Communicating Timed Processes
We study the reachability problem for communicating timed processes, both in
discrete and dense time. Our model comprises automata with local timing
constraints communicating over unbounded FIFO channels. Each automaton can only
access its set of local clocks; all clocks evolve at the same rate. Our main
contribution is a complete characterization of decidable and undecidable
communication topologies, for both discrete and dense time. We also obtain
complexity results, by showing that communicating timed processes are at least
as hard as Petri nets; in the discrete time, we also show equivalence with
Petri nets. Our results follow from mutual topology-preserving reductions
between timed automata and (untimed) counter automata.Comment: Extended versio
Safety verification of asynchronous pushdown systems with shaped stacks
In this paper, we study the program-point reachability problem of concurrent
pushdown systems that communicate via unbounded and unordered message buffers.
Our goal is to relax the common restriction that messages can only be retrieved
by a pushdown process when its stack is empty. We use the notion of partially
commutative context-free grammars to describe a new class of asynchronously
communicating pushdown systems with a mild shape constraint on the stacks for
which the program-point coverability problem remains decidable. Stacks that fit
the shape constraint may reach arbitrary heights; further a process may execute
any communication action (be it process creation, message send or retrieval)
whether or not its stack is empty. This class extends previous computational
models studied in the context of asynchronous programs, and enables the safety
verification of a large class of message passing programs
Session Communication and Integration
The scenario-based specification of a large distributed system is usually
naturally decomposed into various modules. The integration of specification
modules contrasts to the parallel composition of program components, and
includes various ways such as scenario concatenation, choice, and nesting. The
recent development of multiparty session types for process calculi provides
useful techniques to accommodate the protocol modularisation, by encoding
fragments of communication protocols in the usage of private channels for a
class of agents. In this paper, we extend forgoing session type theories by
enhancing the session integration mechanism. More specifically, we propose a
novel synchronous multiparty session type theory, in which sessions are
separated into the communicating and integrating levels. Communicating sessions
record the message-based communications between multiple agents, whilst
integrating sessions describe the integration of communicating ones. A
two-level session type system is developed for pi-calculus with syntactic
primitives for session establishment, and several key properties of the type
system are studied. Applying the theory to system description, we show that a
channel safety property and a session conformance property can be analysed.
Also, to improve the utility of the theory, a process slicing method is used to
help identify the violated sessions in the type checking.Comment: A short version of this paper is submitted for revie
Automatic Verification of Erlang-Style Concurrency
This paper presents an approach to verify safety properties of Erlang-style,
higher-order concurrent programs automatically. Inspired by Core Erlang, we
introduce Lambda-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
Lambda-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 Lambda-Actor and use it to build a polytime computable, flow-based,
abstract semantics of Lambda-Actor programs, which we then use to bootstrap the
ACS construction, thus deriving a more accurate abstract model of the input
program. We have constructed Soter, a tool implementation of the verification
method, thereby obtaining the first fully-automatic, infinite-state model
checker for a core fragment of Erlang. 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 these verification problems surprisingly efficiently.Comment: 12 pages plus appendix, 4 figures, 1 table. The tool is available at
http://mjolnir.cs.ox.ac.uk/soter
Combining behavioural types with security analysis
Today's software systems are highly distributed and interconnected, and they
increasingly rely on communication to achieve their goals; due to their
societal importance, security and trustworthiness are crucial aspects for the
correctness of these systems. Behavioural types, which extend data types by
describing also the structured behaviour of programs, are a widely studied
approach to the enforcement of correctness properties in communicating systems.
This paper offers a unified overview of proposals based on behavioural types
which are aimed at the analysis of security properties
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