Effect Summaries for Thread-Modular Analysis

TL;DR

This paper introduces a heuristic-based approach for efficient thread-modular verification of lock-free data structures, significantly improving speed while maintaining soundness through automatic checking.

Contribution

It presents a novel guess-and-check method that uses heuristics to generate and verify effect summaries automatically, enhancing verification efficiency.

Findings

Up to 100x faster verification compared to existing methods

Automatic checking ensures soundness despite heuristic use

Effective in verifying lock-free data structures

Abstract

We propose a novel guess-and-check principle to increase the efficiency of thread-modular verification of lock-free data structures. We build on a heuristic that guesses candidates for stateless effect summaries of programs by searching the code for instances of a copy-and-check programming idiom common in lock-free data structures. These candidate summaries are used to compute the interference among threads in linear time. Since a candidate summary need not be a sound effect summary, we show how to fully automatically check whether the precision of candidate summaries is sufficient. We can thus perform sound verification despite relying on an unsound heuristic. We have implemented our approach and found it up to two orders of magnitude faster than existing ones.