Deciding Serializability in Network Systems

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Amir, Guy, Barbone, Mark, Amat, Nicolas, Jacobs, Jules
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866918294586392576
author Amir, Guy
Barbone, Mark
Amat, Nicolas
Jacobs, Jules
author_facet Amir, Guy
Barbone, Mark
Amat, Nicolas
Jacobs, Jules
contents We present the SER modeling language for automatically verifying serializability of concurrent programs, i.e., whether every concurrent execution of the program is equivalent to some serial execution. SER programs are suitably restricted to make this problem decidable, while still allowing for an unbounded number of concurrent threads of execution, each potentially running for an unbounded number of steps. Building on prior theoretical results, we give the first automated end-to-end decision procedure that either proves serializability by producing a checkable certificate, or refutes it by producing a counterexample trace. We also present a network-system abstraction to which SER programs compile. Our decision procedure then reduces serializability in this setting to a Petri net reachability query. Furthermore, in order to scale, we curtail the search space via multiple optimizations, including Petri net slicing, semilinear-set compression, and Presburger-formula manipulation. We extensively evaluate our framework and show that, despite the theoretical hardness of the problem, it can successfully handle various models of real-world programs, including stateful firewalls, BGP routers, and more.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_02251
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Deciding Serializability in Network Systems
Amir, Guy
Barbone, Mark
Amat, Nicolas
Jacobs, Jules
Formal Languages and Automata Theory
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Logic in Computer Science
Programming Languages
We present the SER modeling language for automatically verifying serializability of concurrent programs, i.e., whether every concurrent execution of the program is equivalent to some serial execution. SER programs are suitably restricted to make this problem decidable, while still allowing for an unbounded number of concurrent threads of execution, each potentially running for an unbounded number of steps. Building on prior theoretical results, we give the first automated end-to-end decision procedure that either proves serializability by producing a checkable certificate, or refutes it by producing a counterexample trace. We also present a network-system abstraction to which SER programs compile. Our decision procedure then reduces serializability in this setting to a Petri net reachability query. Furthermore, in order to scale, we curtail the search space via multiple optimizations, including Petri net slicing, semilinear-set compression, and Presburger-formula manipulation. We extensively evaluate our framework and show that, despite the theoretical hardness of the problem, it can successfully handle various models of real-world programs, including stateful firewalls, BGP routers, and more.
title Deciding Serializability in Network Systems
topic Formal Languages and Automata Theory
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Logic in Computer Science
Programming Languages
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02251