6,923 research outputs found
Abstract verification and debugging of constraint logic programs
The technique of Abstract Interpretation [13] has allowed the development of sophisticated program analyses which are provably correct and practical. The semantic approximations produced by such analyses have been traditionally applied to optimization during program compilation. However, recently, novel and promising applications of semantic approximations have been proposed in the more general context of program verification and debugging [3],[10],[7]
Abstract Diagnosis for Timed Concurrent Constraint programs
The Timed Concurrent Constraint Language (tccp in short) is a concurrent
logic language based on the simple but powerful concurrent constraint paradigm
of Saraswat. In this paradigm, the notion of store-as-value is replaced by the
notion of store-as-constraint, which introduces some differences w.r.t. other
approaches to concurrency. In this paper, we provide a general framework for
the debugging of tccp programs. To this end, we first present a new compact,
bottom-up semantics for the language that is well suited for debugging and
verification purposes in the context of reactive systems. We also provide an
abstract semantics that allows us to effectively implement debugging algorithms
based on abstract interpretation. Given a tccp program and a behavior
specification, our debugging approach automatically detects whether the program
satisfies the specification. This differs from other semiautomatic approaches
to debugging and avoids the need to provide symptoms in advance. We show the
efficacy of our approach by introducing two illustrative examples. We choose a
specific abstract domain and show how we can detect that a program is
erroneous.Comment: 16 page
Program development using abstract interpretation (and the ciao system preprocessor)
The technique of Abstract Interpretation has allowed the development of very sophisticated global program analyses which are at the same time provably correct and practical. We present in a tutorial fashion a novel program development framework which uses abstract interpretation
as a fundamental tool. The framework uses modular, incremental abstract interpretation to obtain information about the program. This information is used to validate programs, to detect bugs with respect to partial specifications written using assertions (in the program itself and/or in system librarles), to genérate and simplify run-time tests, and to perform high-level program transformations such as múltiple abstract specialization, parallelization, and resource usage control, all in a provably correct way. In the case of validation and debugging, the assertions can refer to a variety of program points such as procedure entry, procedure exit, points within procedures, or global computations. The system can reason with much richer information than, for example, traditional types. This includes data structure shape (including pointer sharing), bounds on data structure sizes, and other operational variable instantiation properties, as well as procedure-level properties such as determinacy, termination, non-failure, and bounds on resource consumption (time or space cost). CiaoPP, the preprocessor of the Ciao multi-paradigm programming system, which implements the described functionality, will be used to illustrate the fundamental ideas
Abstract Interpretation-based verification/certification in the ciaoPP system
CiaoPP is the abstract interpretation-based preprocessor of
the Ciao multi-paradigm (Constraint) Logic Programming system. It uses modular, incremental abstract interpretation as a fundamental tool to obtain information about programs. In CiaoPP, the semantic approximations thus produced have been applied to perform high- and low-level optimizations during program compilation, including transformations such as múltiple abstract specialization, parallelization, partial evaluation, resource usage control, and program verification. More recently, novel and promising applications of such semantic approximations are
being applied in the more general context of program development such as program verification. In this work, we describe our extensión of the system to incorpórate Abstraction-Carrying Code (ACC), a novel approach to mobile code safety. ACC follows the standard strategy of associating safety certificates to programs, originally proposed in Proof Carrying- Code. A distinguishing feature of ACC is that we use an abstraction (or abstract model) of the program computed by standard static analyzers as a certifícate. The validity of the abstraction on the consumer side is checked in a single-pass by a very efficient and specialized abstractinterpreter. We have implemented and benchmarked ACC within CiaoPP. The experimental results show that the checking phase is indeed faster than the proof generation phase, and that the sizes of certificates are reasonable. Moreover, the preprocessor is based on compile-time (and run-time) tools for the certification of CLP programs with resource consumption assurances
Towards Energy Consumption Verification via Static Analysis
In this paper we leverage an existing general framework for resource usage
verification and specialize it for verifying energy consumption specifications
of embedded programs. Such specifications can include both lower and upper
bounds on energy usage, and they can express intervals within which energy
usage is to be certified to be within such bounds. The bounds of the intervals
can be given in general as functions on input data sizes. Our verification
system can prove whether such energy usage specifications are met or not. It
can also infer the particular conditions under which the specifications hold.
To this end, these conditions are also expressed as intervals of functions of
input data sizes, such that a given specification can be proved for some
intervals but disproved for others. The specifications themselves can also
include preconditions expressing intervals for input data sizes. We report on a
prototype implementation of our approach within the CiaoPP system for the XC
language and XS1-L architecture, and illustrate with an example how embedded
software developers can use this tool, and in particular for determining values
for program parameters that ensure meeting a given energy budget while
minimizing the loss in quality of service.Comment: Presented at HIP3ES, 2015 (arXiv: 1501.03064
A Historical Perspective on Runtime Assertion Checking in Software Development
This report presents initial results in the area of software testing and analysis produced as part of the Software Engineering Impact Project. The report describes the historical development of runtime assertion checking, including a description of the origins of and significant features associated with assertion checking mechanisms, and initial findings about current industrial use. A future report will provide a more comprehensive assessment of development practice, for which we invite readers of this report to contribute information
Practical Run-time Checking via Unobtrusive Property Caching
The use of annotations, referred to as assertions or contracts, to describe
program properties for which run-time tests are to be generated, has become
frequent in dynamic programing languages. However, the frameworks proposed to
support such run-time testing generally incur high time and/or space overheads
over standard program execution. We present an approach for reducing this
overhead that is based on the use of memoization to cache intermediate results
of check evaluation, avoiding repeated checking of previously verified
properties. Compared to approaches that reduce checking frequency, our proposal
has the advantage of being exhaustive (i.e., all tests are checked at all
points) while still being much more efficient than standard run-time checking.
Compared to the limited previous work on memoization, it performs the task
without requiring modifications to data structure representation or checking
code. While the approach is general and system-independent, we present it for
concreteness in the context of the Ciao run-time checking framework, which
allows us to provide an operational semantics with checks and caching. We also
report on a prototype implementation and provide some experimental results that
support that using a relatively small cache leads to significant decreases in
run-time checking overhead.Comment: 30 pages, 1 table, 170 figures; added appendix with plots; To appear
in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP), Proceedings of ICLP 201
An Approach to Static Performance Guarantees for Programs with Run-time Checks
Instrumenting programs for performing run-time checking of properties, such
as regular shapes, is a common and useful technique that helps programmers
detect incorrect program behaviors. This is specially true in dynamic languages
such as Prolog. However, such run-time checks inevitably introduce run-time
overhead (in execution time, memory, energy, etc.). Several approaches have
been proposed for reducing such overhead, such as eliminating the checks that
can statically be proved to always succeed, and/or optimizing the way in which
the (remaining) checks are performed. However, there are cases in which it is
not possible to remove all checks statically (e.g., open libraries which must
check their interfaces, complex properties, unknown code, etc.) and in which,
even after optimizations, these remaining checks still may introduce an
unacceptable level of overhead. It is thus important for programmers to be able
to determine the additional cost due to the run-time checks and compare it to
some notion of admissible cost. The common practice used for estimating
run-time checking overhead is profiling, which is not exhaustive by nature.
Instead, we propose a method that uses static analysis to estimate such
overhead, with the advantage that the estimations are functions parameterized
by input data sizes. Unlike profiling, this approach can provide guarantees for
all possible execution traces, and allows assessing how the overhead grows as
the size of the input grows. Our method also extends an existing assertion
verification framework to express "admissible" overheads, and statically and
automatically checks whether the instrumented program conforms with such
specifications. Finally, we present an experimental evaluation of our approach
that suggests that our method is feasible and promising.Comment: 15 pages, 3 tables; submitted to ICLP'18, accepted as technical
communicatio
Applying Formal Methods to Networking: Theory, Techniques and Applications
Despite its great importance, modern network infrastructure is remarkable for
the lack of rigor in its engineering. The Internet which began as a research
experiment was never designed to handle the users and applications it hosts
today. The lack of formalization of the Internet architecture meant limited
abstractions and modularity, especially for the control and management planes,
thus requiring for every new need a new protocol built from scratch. This led
to an unwieldy ossified Internet architecture resistant to any attempts at
formal verification, and an Internet culture where expediency and pragmatism
are favored over formal correctness. Fortunately, recent work in the space of
clean slate Internet design---especially, the software defined networking (SDN)
paradigm---offers the Internet community another chance to develop the right
kind of architecture and abstractions. This has also led to a great resurgence
in interest of applying formal methods to specification, verification, and
synthesis of networking protocols and applications. In this paper, we present a
self-contained tutorial of the formidable amount of work that has been done in
formal methods, and present a survey of its applications to networking.Comment: 30 pages, submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial
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