Permissive interfaces

ABSTRACT

A modular program analysis considers components independently and provides a succinct summary for each component, which is used when checking the rest of the system. Consider a system consisting of a library and a client. A temporal summary, or interface, of the library specifies legal sequences of library calls. The interface is safe if no call sequence violates the library's internal invariants; the interface is permissive if it contains every such sequence. Modular program analysis requires full interfaces, which are both safe and permissive: the client does not cause errors in the library if and only if it makes only sequences of library calls that are allowed by the full interface of the library.Previous interface-based methods have focused on safe interfaces, which may be too restrictive and thus reject good clients. We present an algorithm for automatically synthesizing software interfaces that are both safe and permissive. The algorithm generates interfaces as graphs whose vertices are labeled with predicates over the library's internal state, and whose edges are labeled with library calls. The interface state is refined incrementally until the full interface is constructed. In other words, the algorithm automatically synthesizes a typestate system for the library, against which any client can be checked for compatibility. We present an implementation of the algorithm which is based on the BLAST model checker, and we evaluate some case studies.

REFERENCES

• 1: Rajeev Alur , Pavol Černý , P. Madhusudan , Wonhong Nam, Synthesis of interface specifications for Java classes, Proceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages, p.98-109, January 12-14, 2005, Long Beach, California, USA
• 2: Glenn Ammons , Rastislav Bodík , James R. Larus, Mining specifications, Proceedings of the 29th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages, p.4-16, January 16-18, 2002, Portland, Oregon
• 3: J. Cobleigh, D. Giannakopoulou, and C.S. Pasareanu. Learning assumptions for compositional verification. In TACAS, LNCS 2619, pp. 331--346. Springer 2003.
• 4: Manuvir Das , Sorin Lerner , Mark Seigle, ESP: path-sensitive program verification in polynomial time, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2002 Conference on Programming language design and implementation, June 17-19, 2002, Berlin, Germany
• 5: Luca de Alfaro , Thomas A. Henzinger, Interface automata, Proceedings of the 8th European software engineering conference held jointly with 9th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering, September 10-14, 2001, Vienna, Austria
• 6: Edsger Wybe Dijkstra, A Discipline of Programming, Prentice Hall PTR, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1997
• 7: M.A. Fahndrich and R. DeLine. Typestates for objects. In ECOOP, LNCS 3086, pp. 465--490. Springer 2004.
• 8: Jeffrey S. Foster , Tachio Terauchi , Alex Aiken, Flow-sensitive type qualifiers, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2002 Conference on Programming language design and implementation, June 17-19, 2002, Berlin, Germany
• 9: Dimitra Giannakopoulou , Corina S. Psreanu , Howard Barringer, Assumption Generation for Software Component Verification, Proceedings of the 17th IEEE international conference on Automated software engineering, p.3, September 23-27, 2002
• 10: Susanne Graf , Hassen Saïdi, Construction of Abstract State Graphs with PVS, Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Computer Aided Verification, p.72-83, June 22-25, 1997
• 11: Thomas A. Henzinger , Ranjit Jhala , Rupak Majumdar , Kenneth L. McMillan, Abstractions from proofs, Proceedings of the 31st ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages, p.232-244, January 14-16, 2004, Venice, Italy
• 12: Thomas A. Henzinger , Ranjit Jhala , Rupak Majumdar , Grégoire Sutre, Lazy abstraction, Proceedings of the 29th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages, p.58-70, January 16-18, 2002, Portland, Oregon
• 13: R E Strom , S Yemini, Typestate: A programming language concept for enhancing software reliability, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.12 n.1, p.157-171, Jan. 1986
• 14: John Whaley , Michael C. Martin , Monica S. Lam, Automatic extraction of object-oriented component interfaces, Proceedings of the 2002 ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Software testing and analysis, July 22-24, 2002, Roma, Italy

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.4 Software/Program Verification

General Terms:
Languages, Reliability, Verification

Keywords:
modular verification, software interfaces