Model checking with abstraction for Web services

Abstract

Web services are highly distributed programs and, thus, are prone to concurrency-related errors. Model checking is a powerful technique to identify flaws in concurrent systems. However, the existing model checkers have only very limited support for the programming languages and communication mechanisms used by typical implementations of web services. This chapter presents a formalization of communication semantics geared for web services, and an automated way to extract formal models from programs implementing web services for automatic formal analysis. The formal models are analyzed by means of a symbolic model checker that implements automatic abstraction refinement. Our implementation takes one or more PHP5 programs as input, and is able to verify joint properties of these programs running concurrently. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.