Modern multi-core processors equipped with weak memory models like TSO exhibit executions which – due to store buffers – seemingly reorder program operations. Thus, they deviate from the commonly assumed sequential consistency (SC) semantics. Analysis techniques for concurrent programs consequently need to take reorderings into account. For TSO, this is often accomplished by explicitly modellin...

With the growing importance of software on which human lives increasingly depend, the correctness requirement of the underlying software becomes especially critical. However, the increasing complexities and sizes of modern software systems pose special challenges on the effectiveness as well as efficiency of software verification. Two major obstacles include the quality of test generation in te...

Automatic program verifiers typically generate verification conditions from the program and discharge them with an automated theorem prover. An important consideration is the manner in which program code and invariants are expressed. We have developed a bytecode language (similar, in spirit, to Java bytecode) on which verification is performed. This serves as both an intermediate language for u...

Assurance of software quality and security of computer systems have become dominant concerns in our networking age, to which models of program execution are important. A good model of program execution would allow program execution to be reliably and efficiently identified and verified online. On one hand, online program execution identification and verification help increase assurance of trust...

We formalize the problem of program verification as a learning problem, showing that invariants in program verification can be regarded as geometric concepts in machine learning. Safety properties define bad states: states a program should not reach. Program verification explains why a program’s set of reachable states is disjoint from the set of bad states. In Hoare Logic, these explanations a...

To enable scalability and address the needs of real-world software, deductive verification relies on modularization of the target program and decomposition of its requirement specification. In this paper, we present an approach that, given a Java program and a partial requirement specification written using the Java Modeling Language, constructs a semantic slice. In the slice, the parts of the ...

A powerful approach to finding errors in computer software is to translate a given program into a verification condition, a logical formula that is valid if and only if the program is free of the classes of errors under consideration. Finding errors in the program is then done by mechanically searching for counterexamples to the verification condition. This paper gives an overview of the techno...

Random testing is a powerful method for verifying program properties. However, as the complexity of the program and properties increases, writing customized input data generators quickly becomes necessary. We present a method for systematic generation of input data by lazy instantiation using meta variables and parallel partial evaluation of properties. This is applied on specification based pr...