Jules Jacobs ยท Publications

Deciding Serializability in Network Systems

Guy Amir, Mark Barbone, Nicolas Amat and Jules Jacobs. TACAS'26.

A concurrent program is serializable if every concurrent execution is equivalent to some serial one. This paper presents SER, a modeling language restricted so that this is decidable, and a decision procedure that reduces it to Petri net reachability and returns a certificate or a counterexample trace. With several optimizations, it handles models of stateful firewalls, BGP routers and more.

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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.

Cite

@inbook{amir2026serializability,
  title = {Deciding Serializability in Network Systems},
  ISBN = {9783032227492},
  ISSN = {1611-3349},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-22749-2_5},
  DOI = {10.1007/978-3-032-22749-2_5},
  booktitle = {Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems},
  publisher = {Springer Nature Switzerland},
  author = {Amir, Guy and Barbone, Mark and Amat, Nicolas and Jacobs, Jules},
  year = {2026},
  pages = {85--108}
}