Canary: practical static detection of inter-thread value-flow bugs

Concurrent programs are still prone to bugs arising from the subtle interleavings of threads. Traditional static analysis for concurrent programs, such as data-flow analysis and symbolic execution, has to explicitly explore redundant control states, leading to prohibitive computational complexity.

This paper presents a value-flow analysis framework for concurrent programs called Canary that is practical to statically find diversified inter-thread value-flow bugs. Our work is the first to convert the concurrency bug detection to a source-sink reachability problem, effectively reducing redundant thread interleavings. Specifically, we propose a scalable thread-modular algorithm to capture data and interference dependence in a value-flow graph. The relevant edges of value flows are annotated with execution constraints as guards to describe the conditions of value flows. Canary then traverses the graph to detect concurrency defects via tracking the source-sink properties and solving the aggregated guards of value flows with an SMT solver to decide the realizability of interleaving executions. Experiments show that Canary is precise, scalable, and practical, detecting over eighteen previously unknown concurrency bugs in large, widely-used software systems with low false positives.

• Software and its engineering → Software verification and validation.