PhD Qualifying Dissertation Validating and Verifying Memory Safety for Concurrent Operating System Code

The current practice of finding programming errors in operating system development is by testing and debugging. However, testing techniques are expensive because of their requirement of manual labour. Furthermore, they are susceptible to missing severe errors. This problem can be solved by applying automated verification techniques such as software model checking. Most of these techniques suffer from limitations in analysing pointer programs and dealing with concurrency. Because of this, verification methods available today are not sufficient to cover the class of software defects related to memory safety in concurrent reactive software systems. In this dissertation we give a review on current practice and state-ofthe-art techniques and tools for detecting memory safety errors in computer programs. Furthermore we outline a new approach in validating and verifying memory safety properties for concurrent reactive software systems such as device drivers. Our approach is based on both, program simulation and software model checking. In contrast to previous work on memory safety problems, we intend to provide a fully automatic analysis and verification framework covering a broad range of memory safety related problems.