Discovering thread interactions in a concurrent system

Abstract

Understanding the behavior of a system is a central reverse engineering task, and is crucial for being able to modify, maintain, and improve the system. An often difficult aspect of some system behaviors is concurrency, in particular identifying those areas that exhibit mutual exclusion and those that exhibit synchronization. In this paper we present a technique that builds on our previous work in behavior discovery to find the points in the system that demonstrate mutually exclusive and synchronized behavior. Finding these points in the behavior of the system is an important aid in reverse engineering a complete and correct model of the system.