10,420 research outputs found
Query Stability in Monotonic Data-Aware Business Processes [Extended Version]
Organizations continuously accumulate data, often according to some business
processes. If one poses a query over such data for decision support, it is
important to know whether the query is stable, that is, whether the answers
will stay the same or may change in the future because business processes may
add further data. We investigate query stability for conjunctive queries. To
this end, we define a formalism that combines an explicit representation of the
control flow of a process with a specification of how data is read and inserted
into the database. We consider different restrictions of the process model and
the state of the system, such as negation in conditions, cyclic executions,
read access to written data, presence of pending process instances, and the
possibility to start fresh process instances. We identify for which facet
combinations stability of conjunctive queries is decidable and provide
encodings into variants of Datalog that are optimal with respect to the
worst-case complexity of the problem.Comment: This report is the extended version of a paper accepted at the 19th
International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT 2016), March 15-18, 2016 -
Bordeaux, Franc
Data refinement for true concurrency
The majority of modern systems exhibit sophisticated concurrent behaviour, where several system components modify and observe the system state with fine-grained atomicity. Many systems (e.g., multi-core processors, real-time controllers) also exhibit truly concurrent behaviour, where multiple events can occur simultaneously. This paper presents data refinement defined in terms of an interval-based framework, which includes high-level operators that capture non-deterministic expression evaluation. By modifying the type of an interval, our theory may be specialised to cover data refinement of both discrete and continuous systems. We present an interval-based encoding of forward simulation, then prove that our forward simulation rule is sound with respect to our data refinement definition. A number of rules for decomposing forward simulation proofs over both sequential and parallel composition are developed
Reasoning algebraically about refinement on TSO architectures
The Total Store Order memory model is widely implemented by modern multicore architectures such as x86, where local buffers are used for optimisation, allowing limited forms of instruction reordering. The presence of buffers and hardware-controlled buffer flushes increases the level of non-determinism from the level specified by a program, complicating the already difficult task of concurrent programming. This paper presents a new notion of refinement for weak memory models, based on the observation that pending writes to a process' local variables may be treated as if the effect of the update has already occurred in shared memory. We develop an interval-based model with algebraic rules for various programming constructs. In this framework, several decomposition rules for our new notion of refinement are developed. We apply our approach to verify the spinlock algorithm from the literature
The Meaning of Memory Safety
We give a rigorous characterization of what it means for a programming
language to be memory safe, capturing the intuition that memory safety supports
local reasoning about state. We formalize this principle in two ways. First, we
show how a small memory-safe language validates a noninterference property: a
program can neither affect nor be affected by unreachable parts of the state.
Second, we extend separation logic, a proof system for heap-manipulating
programs, with a memory-safe variant of its frame rule. The new rule is
stronger because it applies even when parts of the program are buggy or
malicious, but also weaker because it demands a stricter form of separation
between parts of the program state. We also consider a number of pragmatically
motivated variations on memory safety and the reasoning principles they
support. As an application of our characterization, we evaluate the security of
a previously proposed dynamic monitor for memory safety of heap-allocated data.Comment: POST'18 final versio
A Graph-Based Semantics Workbench for Concurrent Asynchronous Programs
A number of novel programming languages and libraries have been proposed that
offer simpler-to-use models of concurrency than threads. It is challenging,
however, to devise execution models that successfully realise their
abstractions without forfeiting performance or introducing unintended
behaviours. This is exemplified by SCOOP---a concurrent object-oriented
message-passing language---which has seen multiple semantics proposed and
implemented over its evolution. We propose a "semantics workbench" with fully
and semi-automatic tools for SCOOP, that can be used to analyse and compare
programs with respect to different execution models. We demonstrate its use in
checking the consistency of semantics by applying it to a set of representative
programs, and highlighting a deadlock-related discrepancy between the principal
execution models of the language. Our workbench is based on a modular and
parameterisable graph transformation semantics implemented in the GROOVE tool.
We discuss how graph transformations are leveraged to atomically model
intricate language abstractions, and how the visual yet algebraic nature of the
model can be used to ascertain soundness.Comment: Accepted for publication in the proceedings of FASE 2016 (to appear
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