STORM: static unit checking of concurrent programs

Concurrency is inherent in today's software. Unexpected interactions between concurrently executing threads often cause subtle bugs in concurrent programs. Such bugs are hard to discover using traditional testing techniques since they require executing a program on a particular unit test (i.e. input) through a particular thread interleaving. A promising solution to this problem is static program analysis since it can simultaneously check a concurrent program on all inputs as well as through all possible thread interleavings. This paper describes a scalable, automatic, and precise approach to static unit checking of concurrent programs implemented in a tool called Storm. Storm has been applied on a number of real-world Windows device drivers, and the tool found a previously undiscovered concurrency bug in a driver from Microsoft's Driver Development Kit.