Incremental Verification of Concurrent Programs through Refinement Constraint Adaptation

Programs evolve continuously throughout their life cycles. Verifying each version from scratch is usually impractical, especially for concurrent programs. Designing efficient incremental verification techniques for concurrent programs is highly desired. We focus on the abstraction refinement technique for concurrent program verification. When a program is modified, those refinement constraints generated in the verifications of previous versions are adapted to the new program to avoid redundant analysis. We propose a kernel source based refinement constraint adaptation approach for the scheduling constraint based abstraction refinement method, one of the most efficient abstraction refinement methods for concurrent program verification. Our method supports all kinds of program modifications, and generates adapted refinement constraints according to the modifications. Evaluation on the benchmarks from SV-COMP 2024 and Nidhugg benchmarks shows promising results of our method. Most of the refinement constraints generated in the verification of previous versions can be adapted to the modified program in our experiments. Compared with verifying the modified program from scratch, our incremental verification method can achieve two orders of magnitude speedup for those complex programs.