Narrowing and heuristic search for symbolic reachability analysis of concurrent object-oriented systems

A concurrent system specified as a rewrite theory can be analyzed symbolically using narrowing-based reachability analysis. Narrowing-based approaches have been applied to formally analyze cryptographic protocols and parameterized protocols. However, existing narrowing-based analysis methods, based...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Science of computer programming Vol. 235; p. 103097
Main Authors: Kang, Byeongjee, Bae, Kyungmin
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Elsevier B.V 01.07.2024
Subjects:
Heuristic search
Narrowing
Rewriting logic
Symbolic reachability analysis
Rewriting logic
Narrowing
Heuristic search
Symbolic reachability analysis
ISSN:0167-6423, 1872-7964
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:A concurrent system specified as a rewrite theory can be analyzed symbolically using narrowing-based reachability analysis. Narrowing-based approaches have been applied to formally analyze cryptographic protocols and parameterized protocols. However, existing narrowing-based analysis methods, based on a breadth-first-search strategy, cannot deal with generic distributed systems with objects and messages due to the symbolic state-space explosion problem and implicit constraints imposed on object-oriented systems. This paper proposes a heuristic search approach for narrowing-based reachability analysis to guide the search for counterexamples with a small number of objects. As a result, our method can effectively find a counterexample if an error state is reachable. In addition, this paper also shows how to encode implicit object-oriented constraints using order-sorted signatures and equational constraints. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our technique using a nontrivial distributed consensus algorithm.
ISSN:0167-6423
1872-7964
DOI:10.1016/j.scico.2024.103097