License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)
When quoting this document, please refer to the following
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.CONCUR.2023.25
URN: urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-190195
URL: http://dagstuhl.sunsite.rwth-aachen.de/volltexte/2023/19019/
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Raad, Azalea ; Vanegue, Julien ; Berdine, Josh ; O'Hearn, Peter

A General Approach to Under-Approximate Reasoning About Concurrent Programs

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LIPIcs-CONCUR-2023-25.pdf (0.9 MB)

Abstract

There is a large body of work on concurrent reasoning including Rely-Guarantee (RG) and Concurrent Separation Logics. These theories are over-approximate: a proof identifies a superset of program behaviours and thus implies the absence of certain bugs. However, failure to find a proof does not imply their presence (leading to false positives in over-approximate tools). We describe a general theory of under-approximate reasoning for concurrency. Our theory incorporates ideas from Concurrent Incorrectness Separation Logic and RG based on a subset rather than a superset of interleavings. A strong motivation of our work is detecting software exploits; we do this by developing concurrent adversarial separation logic (CASL), and use CASL to detect information disclosure attacks that uncover sensitive data (e.g. passwords) and out-of-bounds attacks that corrupt data. We also illustrate our approach with classic concurrency idioms that go beyond prior under-approximate theories which we believe can inform the design of future concurrent bug detection tools.

BibTeX - Entry

@InProceedings{raad_et_al:LIPIcs.CONCUR.2023.25,
  author =	{Raad, Azalea and Vanegue, Julien and Berdine, Josh and O'Hearn, Peter},
  title =	{{A General Approach to Under-Approximate Reasoning About Concurrent Programs}},
  booktitle =	{34th International Conference on Concurrency Theory (CONCUR 2023)},
  pages =	{25:1--25:17},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-299-0},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2023},
  volume =	{279},
  editor =	{P\'{e}rez, Guillermo A. and Raskin, Jean-Fran\c{c}ois},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2023/19019},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-190195},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.CONCUR.2023.25},
  annote =	{Keywords: Under-approximate reasoning, incorrectness logic, bug detection, software exploits, separation logic}
}

Keywords: Under-approximate reasoning, incorrectness logic, bug detection, software exploits, separation logic
Collection: 34th International Conference on Concurrency Theory (CONCUR 2023)
Issue Date: 2023
Date of publication: 07.09.2023

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