Fine-Grained Complexity of Safety Verification

TL;DR

This paper investigates the computational complexity of safety verification problems in shared memory concurrent programs, providing new algorithms and lower bounds based on ETH and Set Cover, and analyzing kernelization limits.

Contribution

It introduces fixed-parameter tractable algorithms for Leader Contributor Reachability and Bounded-Stage Reachability, along with matching lower bounds and kernelization impossibility results.

Findings

Algorithms run in fixed-parameter tractable time for both problems.

Matching lower bounds based on ETH and Set Cover are established.

No polynomial kernels exist for the problems under certain parameters.

Abstract

We study the fine-grained complexity of Leader Contributor Reachability (LCR) and Bounded-Stage Reachability (BSR), two variants of the safety verification problem for shared memory concurrent programs. For both problems, the memory is a single variable over a finite data domain. Our contributions are new verification algorithms and lower bounds. The latter are based on the Exponential Time Hypothesis (ETH), the problem Set Cover, and cross-compositions. LCR is the question whether a designated leader thread can reach an unsafe state when interacting with a certain number of equal contributor threads. We suggest two parameterizations: (1) By the size of the data domain D and the size of the leader L, and (2) by the size of the contributors C. We present algorithms for both cases. The key techniques are compact witnesses and dynamic programming. The algorithms run in O*((L(D+1))^(LD) * D^D) and O*(2^C) time, showing that both parameterizations are fixed-parameter tractable. We complement the upper bounds by (matching) lower bounds based on ETH and Set Cover. Moreover, we prove the absence of polynomial kernels. For BSR, we consider programs involving t different threads. We restrict the analysis to computations where the write permission changes s times between the threads. BSR asks whether a given configuration is reachable via such an s-stage computation. When parameterized by P, the maximum size of a thread, and t, the interesting observation is that the problem has a large number of difficult instances. Formally, we show that there is no polynomial kernel, no compression algorithm that reduces the size of the data domain D or the number of stages s to a polynomial dependence on P and t. This indicates that symbolic methods may be harder to find for this problem.