Deciding Serializability in Network Systems

2026-01-05

arXiv.org

AI Summary

This work addresses the problem of verifying serializability in concurrent programs—determining whether all their concurrent executions are equivalent to some serial execution. To this end, the authors propose SER, a dedicated modeling language, together with an end-to-end automated verification pipeline that, for the first time, enables fully automatic serializability checking under unbounded thread counts and execution lengths. The approach reduces the problem to reachability queries in Petri nets and incorporates several scalability-enhancing optimizations, including Petri net slicing, semilinear set compression, and Presburger arithmetic manipulations. The system produces either machine-checkable certificates of correctness or concrete counterexamples, and has been successfully applied to real-world network system models such as stateful firewalls and BGP routers, demonstrating both theoretical rigor and practical utility.

Technology Category

• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Satisfiability Modulo Theories
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Automated Reasoning and Theorem Proving

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Efficiency and scalability of Web search engines

Abstract

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.

Problem

• serializability
• concurrent programs
• network systems
• Petri net reachability
• decision procedure

Innovation

• serializability
• concurrent program verification
• Petri net reachability
• automated decision procedure
• network system abstraction