Inferring models of concurrent systems from logs of their behavior with CSight

Download: PDF, slides (PDF), CSight implementation.

“Inferring models of concurrent systems from logs of their behavior with CSight” by Ivan Beschastnikh, Yuriy Brun, Michael D. Ernst, and Arvind Krishnamurthy. In ICSE 2014, Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering, (Hyderabad, India), June 2014, pp. 468-479.
A previous version appeared as “Inferring models of concurrent systems from logs of their behavior with CSight” by Ivan Beschastnikh, Yuriy Brun, Michael D. Ernst, and Arvind Krishnamurthy, University of British Columbia cIRcle: UBC's Digital Repository, (Vancouver, BC, Canada). February 28, 2014. https://hdl.handle.net/2429/46122.

Abstract

Concurrent systems are notoriously difficult to debug and understand. A common way of gaining insight into system behavior is to inspect execution logs and documentation. Unfortunately, manual inspection of logs is an arduous process, and documentation is often incomplete and out of sync with the implementation.

To provide developers with more insight into concurrent systems, we developed CSight. CSight mines logs of a system's executions to infer a concise and accurate model of that system's behavior, in the form of a communicating finite state machine (CFSM).

Engineers can use the inferred CFSM model to understand complex behavior, detect anomalies, debug, and increase confidence in the correctness of their implementations. CSight's only requirement is that the logged events have vector timestamps. We provide a tool that automatically adds vector timestamps to system logs. Our tool prototypes are available at https://github.com/ModelInference/synoptic.

This paper presents algorithms for inferring CFSM models from traces of concurrent systems, proves them correct, provides an implementation, and evaluates the implementation in two ways: by running it on logs from three different networked systems and via a user study that focused on bug finding. Our evaluation finds that CSight infers accurate models that can help developers find bugs.

Download: PDF, slides (PDF), CSight implementation.

BibTeX entry:

@inproceedings{BeschastnikhBEK2014,
   author = {Ivan Beschastnikh and Yuriy Brun and Michael D. Ernst and
	Arvind Krishnamurthy},
   title = {Inferring models of concurrent systems from logs of their
	behavior with {CSight}},
   booktitle = {ICSE 2014, Proceedings of the 36th International
	Conference on Software Engineering},
   pages = {468--479},
   address = {Hyderabad, India},
   month = jun,
   year = {2014}
}