An integrated specification and verification technique for highly concurrent data structures

Abstract. We present a technique for automatically verifying safety properties of concurrent programs, in particular programs which rely on subtle dependen-cies of local states of different threads, such as lock-free implementations of stacks and queues in an environment without garbage collection. Our technique addresses the joint challenges of infinite-state specifications, an unbounded num-ber of threads, and an unbounded heap managed by explicit memory allocation. Our technique builds on the automata-theoretic approach to model checking, in which a specification is given by an automaton that observes the execution of a program and accepts executions that violate the intended specification. We extend this approach by allowing specifications to be given by a class of infinite-state au-tomata. We show how such automata can be used to specify queues, stacks, and other data structures, by extending a data-independence argument. For verifica-tion, we develop a shape analysis, which tracks correlations between pairs of threads, and a novel abstraction to make the analysis practical. We have imple-mented our method and used it to verify programs, some of which have not been verified by any other automatic method before.