Behavioural Properties and Dynamic Software Update for Concurrent Programs, Thesis Progress Report

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Description/Abstract

Correctly developing multi-threaded programs is notoriously difficult, and getting total coverage using traditional testing paradigms, to guarantee the program is correct, is often infeasible. We expand on previous work to provide various tools, namely a generalisation of session typing and an extension of policy automata to multi-threaded code, with which to verify multi-threaded code. Additionally, most programs are not written once and then left; maintaining and updating software is an essential part of the software development cycle. Dynamic software update (DSU) “is a technique by which a running program can be updated with new code and data without interrupting its execution” [45] and uses code analyses to ensure given safety properties are maintained across update boundaries. We present techniques for verifying if a modification can be applied to a running program whilst maintaining the desired behavioural properties, which may be those the program had before or some new properties.