research-article

ConSeq: detecting concurrency bugs through sequential errors

Authors:

Ramya Olichandran,

Joel Scherpelz,

Thomas RepsAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News, Volume 39, Issue 1

Pages 251 - 264

https://doi.org/10.1145/1961295.1950395

Published: 05 March 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Concurrency bugs are caused by non-deterministic interleavings between shared memory accesses. Their effects propagate through data and control dependences until they cause software to crash, hang, produce incorrect output, etc. The lifecycle of a bug thus consists of three phases: (1) triggering, (2) propagation, and (3) failure.

Traditional techniques for detecting concurrency bugs mostly focus on phase (1)--i.e., on finding certain structural patterns of interleavings that are common triggers of concurrency bugs, such as data races. This paper explores a consequence-oriented approach to improving the accuracy and coverage of state-space search and bug detection. The proposed approach first statically identifies potential failure sites in a program binary (i.e., it first considers a phase (3) issue). It then uses static slicing to identify critical read instructions that are highly likely to affect potential failure sites through control and data dependences (phase (2)). Finally, it monitors a single (correct) execution of a concurrent program and identifies suspicious interleavings that could cause an incorrect state to arise at a critical read and then lead to a software failure (phase (1)).

ConSeq's backwards approach, (3)!(2)!(1), provides advantages in bug-detection coverage and accuracy but is challenging to carry out. ConSeq makes it feasible by exploiting the empirical observationthat phases (2) and (3) usually are short and occur within one thread. Our evaluation on large, real-world C/C++ applications shows that ConSeq detects more bugs than traditional approaches and has a much lower false-positive rate.

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Index Terms

ConSeq: detecting concurrency bugs through sequential errors
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software verification and validation
      1. Software defect analysis
        Software testing and debugging

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Published In

cover image ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News

ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News Volume 39, Issue 1

ASPLOS '11

March 2011

407 pages

ISSN:0163-5964

DOI:10.1145/1961295

Issue’s Table of Contents

ASPLOS XVI: Proceedings of the sixteenth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
March 2011
432 pages
ISBN:9781450302661
DOI:10.1145/1950365
General Chair:
Rajiv Gupta
University of California, Riverside
,
Program Chair:
Todd C. Mowry
Carnegie Mellon University

Copyright © 2011 ACM.

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Published: 05 March 2011

Published in SIGARCH Volume 39, Issue 1

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https://doi.org/10.1109/TrustCom60117.2023.00371
Leesatapornwongsa TRen XNath SRoychoudhury ACadar CKim M(2022)FlakeRepro: automated and efficient reproduction of concurrency-related flaky testsProceedings of the 30th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3540250.3558956(1509-1520)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3540250.3558956
Li CChen RWang BYu TGao DYang MRyu SSmaragdakis Y(2022)Precise and efficient atomicity violation detection for interrupt-driven programs via staged path pruningProceedings of the 31st ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/3533767.3534412(506-518)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3533767.3534412
Ko YZhu BKim J(2022)Fuzzing with automatically controlled interleavings to detect concurrency bugsJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2022.111379191(111379)Online publication date: Sep-2022
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2022.111379
Hua BOuyang WJiang CFan QPan Z(2021)Rupair: Towards Automatic Buffer Overflow Detection and Rectification for RustProceedings of the 37th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference10.1145/3485832.3485841(812-823)Online publication date: 6-Dec-2021
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Orton IMycroft ACok D(2021)Source code patches from dynamic analysisProceedings of the 23rd ACM International Workshop on Formal Techniques for Java-like Programs10.1145/3464971.3468416(1-8)Online publication date: 13-Jul-2021
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Vinesh NRawat SBos HGiuffrida CSethumadhavan M(2019)ConFuzz—A Concurrency FuzzerFirst International Conference on Sustainable Technologies for Computational Intelligence10.1007/978-981-15-0029-9_53(667-691)Online publication date: 2-Nov-2019
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