Verification and Testing (WS 2022/23)

Course Number 705040 and 705041 | Wintersemester 2022/23

Content

In this course, we teach various advanced methods to test and verify software and hardware. Instead of classical unit tests, we present techniques for automatic detection of bugs with little user-effort and methods to prove the correctness of a program independent of concrete input values.

The lecture starts with dynamic methods to detect and locate potential bugs related to concurrency or invalid memory accesses. Those bugs are hard to find with unit tests because they seem to show up randomly and are hard to reproduce. In the following lectures, we move on to static methods. Within these chapters, we show you how to prove the correctness of a program formally. Finally, the lecture ends with a session where we present current research topics to you. If you are interested in a master project, thesis, or internship on one of these projects, don’t hesitate to contact us!

The content of this lecture includes:

  • Eraser algorithm to detect race conditions
  • Locktree algorithms to identify potential deadlocks
  • How Valgrind finds invalid memory accesses
  • Static Analysis
  • Symbolic Encoding, Bounded Model Checking, and Concolic Execution
  • Hoare Logic
  • Deductive Software Verification with Dafny
  • Boolean Model Checking with the SLAM algorithm

Material

DATE TOPIC Papers Slides
06.10.2022 Intro vt01-intro
13.10.2022 Eraser & Locktree [1] [2] vt02 – concurrency
20.10.2022 Memory Debuggers [3] [4] vt03-memory_debugging
27.10.2022 Symbolic Methods vt04 – SymbolicVerification
03.11.2022 Hoare Logic [6] [7][8] vt05 – hoare logic
10.11.2022 Hoare Logic Chapters 2.1.10 and 5.1-5.4 in [6].
17.11.2022 Deductive Program Verification [9] dafny_examples.zip
24.11.2022 SLAM vt081 – SLAM – motivation and example
01.12.2022 SLAM vt082 – SLAM – abstraction
15.12.2022 SLAM vt083 – SLAM – discovering predicates vt084 – SLAM – Boolean Model Checking
12.01.2023 Java Path Finder vt07-jpf.pdf
19.01.2023 Current Research Topics & Question Hour

Resources

[1] Eraser: S. Savage, M. Burrows, G. Nelson, P. Sobalvarro, T. Anderson, Eraser:A Dynamic Race Detector for Multithreaded Programs, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems Volume 15 Issue 4, November 1997.
[2] Lock Tree & Java Path Finder: W. Visser, K. Havelund, G. Brat, S. Park and F. Lerda, Model Checking Programs, International Journal on Automated Software Engineering 10(2), April 2003. Extended journal version of paper presented at the ASE’00 conference.
[3] AdressSanitizer: Serebryany, K., Bruening, D., Potapenko, A., & Vyukov, D. AddressSanitizer: A Fast Address Sanity Checker, 2012 USENIX Annual Technical Conference
[4] MemorySanitizer: Stepanov, E., & Serebryany, K. MemorySanitizer: fast detector of uninitialized memory use in C++, 2015 IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization (CGO)
[6] Hoare Logic: Hoare-Logic course .
[7] Hoare Logic: Hoare-Logic Uni Trier (German) .
[8] Hoare Logic: F. Wotawa,Einführung in die InformatikSkriptum,pp. 157-171,(German), Oktober 2002.
[9] Dafny: K. Rustan M. Leino Dafny: An Automatic Program Verifier for Functional Correctness., LPAR-16, International Conference on Logic for Programming Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning, LNCS 6355, pp. 348-370, 2010

Exercises

The assignments will be made available on our git repository: upstream
You will receive your own git repository shortly, it will be used to submit your work.

Calendar

Assignment Handout Question Hour Deadline
A1 Eraser 13.10.2022 20.10.2022 15:00 27.10.2022 23:59
A2 Hoare 03.11.2022 10.11.2022 15:00 17.11.2022 23:59
A3 Dafny 17.11.2022 24.11.2022 15:00 9.12.2022 23:59
A4 SLAM 15.12.2022 12.1.2023 16:00 19.1.2023 23:59

Exercise interviews (Abgabegespräche) will be on the 24.01.2023.

Administrative Information

Previous Knowledge

inscription in the master`s program

Prerequisites Curriculum

See position in the curriculum

Objective

Knowledge of the state of the art in research in formal verification and testing.

Language

English

Teaching Method

Interactive lectures either online or in the lecture hall

How to get a grade

written examination

Registration

https://online.tugraz.at/tug_online/ee/rest/pages/slc.tm.cp/course-registration/337444

Lecturers