Interference relation-guided SMT solving for multi-threaded program verification

Concurrent program verification is challenging due to a large number of thread interferences. A popular approach is to encode concurrent programs as SMT formulas and then rely on off-the-shelf SMT solvers to accomplish the verification. In most existing works, an SMT solver is simply treated as the backend. There is little research on improving SMT solving for concurrent program verification.

In this paper, we recognize the characteristics of interference relation in multi-threaded programs and propose a novel approach for utilizing the interference relation in the SMT solving of multi-threaded program verification under various memory models. We show that the backend SMT solver can benefit a lot from the domain knowledge of concurrent programs. We implemented our approach in a prototype tool called Zpre. We compared it with the state-ofthe-art Z3 tool on credible benchmarks from the Concurren-cySafety category of SV-COMP 2019. Experimental results show promising improvements attributed to our approach.

• Software and its engineering → Software verification and validation; • Theory of computation → Logic and verification.