Abstract

I will describe recent advances in the area of automatic program termination analysis. In particular, I will describe the development of several automatic tools, called TERMINATOR and MUTANT , which implement new termination analysis algorithms. These tools have been used to prove that Windows device driver dispatch routines always return control back to their caller. The tools have also found a number of critical termination bugs in device drivers.

Bio: Dr. Byron Cook is a researcher at Microsoft Research, Cambridge. His research interests include automatic formal software verification, automatic theorem proving, and programming language theory. Before coming to Cambridge Byron co-developed the SLAM software model checker. SLAM is now used in a Windows product called Static Driver Verifier, which automatically finds bugs in Windows OS device drivers. Before joining Microsoft, Byron worked at Prover Technology. Byron’s PhD is from OGI . For more information about Byron, see http://research.microsoft.com/~bycook.