Model checking büchi pushdown systems
FASE'11/ETAPS'11 Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Fundamental approaches to software engineering: part of the joint European conferences on theory and practice of software
Formalizing hardware/software interface specifications
ASE '11 Proceedings of the 2011 26th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering
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Hardware/Software (HW/SW) interfaces are pervasive in computer systems. However, many HW/SW interface implementations are unreliable due to their intrinsically complicated nature. In industrial settings, there are three major challenges to improving reliability. First, as there is no systematic framework for HW/SW interface specifications, interface protocols cannot be precisely conveyed to engineers. Second, as there is no unifying formal model for representing the implementation semantics of HW/SW interfaces accurately, some critical properties cannot be formally verified on HW/SW interface implementations. Finally, few automatic tools exist to help engineers in HW/SW interface development. In this dissertation, we present an automata-theoretic approach to HW/SW co-verification that addresses these challenges. We designed a co-specification framework to formally specify HW/SW interface protocols; we synthesized a hybrid B¨uchi Automaton Pushdown System, namely Büchi Pushdown System (BPDS), as the unifying formal model for HW/SW interfaces; and we created a co-verification tool, CoVer that implements our model checking algorithms and realizes our reduction algorithms for BPDS.The application of our approach to the Windows device/driver framework has resulted in the detection of fifteen specification issues. Furthermore, utilizing CoVer, we discovered twelve real bugs in five drivers. These non-trivial findings have demonstrated the significance of our approach in industrial applications.