Systems Analysis Group

Not only does the analysis of distributed systems typically grow significantly more complex with each additional node, many traditional analysis methods fail to cover the distributed case completely. The primary research focus of the COMSYS Systems Analysis Group is to develop novel and improved approaches to managing the complexity in Distributed Systems Analysis.

The testability and, in a more general sense, verification of Distributed Systems is one of our major areas of research. We employ different techniques, like Symbolic Execution and Discrete Event Simulation, to find possible errors at scale.

Available Theses

The Systems Analysis Group always has a range of thesis topics available for motivated and talented students. An excerpt of available theses can be seen from inside the RWTH University network.

People

Julian Büning, M.Sc.
Julian Büning, M.Sc.

julian.buening@comsys.rwth-aachen.de

Klaus Wehrle
Klaus Wehrle

klaus.wehrle@comsys.rwth-aachen.de

(Past) Projects

ERC April 2021 - September 2022
SAFE: Safety Analysis of Concurrent Systems

SAFE provides a rigorous and automated methodology for systematically detecting errors in concurrent software, addressing the challenges posed by multi-core processors and concurrency bugs. Building on technology from the SYMBIOSYS project, SAFE’s approach has already demonstrated success in identifying bugs in real-world software.

ERC August 2015 - July 2021
SYMBIOSYS: Symbolic analysis of temporal and functional behavior of networked systems

SYMBIOSYS develops a novel methodology for analyzing the temporal and functional behavior of networked systems by combining symbolic execution with distributed and temporal execution techniques. The project enables efficient exploration of distributed execution paths, uncovering critical bugs in real-world software and advancing the reliability of networked systems.

Cluster of Excellence November 2006 - October 2014
KleeNet: Symbolic execution of distributed systems

KleeNet uses symbolic execution to detect low-probability bugs before deployment. It integrates with the COOJA simulator to enable high-coverage testing and early detection of complex interaction bugs.

Selected Publications

Daniel Schemmel, Julian Büning, Frank Busse, Martin Nowack, Cristian Cadar. A Deterministic Memory Allocator for Dynamic Symbolic Execution. Proceedings of the 36th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2022), Jun 6 - Jun 10, 2022. June 2022.
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Daniel Schemmel, Julian Büning, César Rodríguez, David Laprell, Klaus Wehrle. Symbolic Partial-Order Execution for Testing Multi-Threaded Programs. Computer Aided Verification. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 12224. Presented at the 32nd International Conference on Computer Aided Verification (CAV '20), Jul 21 - Jul 24, 2020. July 2020.
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Felix Rath, Daniel Schemmel, Klaus Wehrle. Interoperability-Guided Testing of QUIC Implementations using Symbolic Execution. Proceedings of the Workshop on the Evolution, Performance, and Interoperability of QUIC, Dec 4, 2018, Heraklion, Greece. December 2018.
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Mirko Stoffers, Daniel Schemmel, Oscar Soria Dustmann, Klaus Wehrle. On Automated Memoization in the Field of Simulation Parameter Studies. ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS), vol. 28, no. 4. October 2018.
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Oscar Soria Dustmann, Klaus Wehrle, Cristian Cadar. PARTI: A Multi-interval Theory Solver for Symbolic Execution. Proceedings of the 33rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE'18), Sep 3 - Sep 7, 2018, Montpellier, France. September 2018.
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Daniel Schemmel, René Glebke, Mirko Stoffers, Klaus Wehrle. Towards Benchmark Optimization by Automated Equivalence Detection. Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Benchmarking Cyber-Physical Networks and Systems (CPSBench'18), Apr 10, 2018, Porto, Portugal. April 2018.
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Mirko Stoffers, Ralf Bettermann, Klaus Wehrle. Automated Memoization: Automatically Identifying Memoization Units in Simulation Parameter Studies. Proceedings of the 21st IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real Time Applications (DS-RT 2017), Oct 18 - Oct 20, 2017, Rome, Italy. October 2017.
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Daniel Liew, Daniel Schemmel, Cristian Cadar, Alastair Donaldson, Rafael Zähl, Klaus Wehrle. Floating-Point Symbolic Execution: A Case Study in N-Version Programming. Proceedings of the 32nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA. October 2017.
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Felix Rath, Johannes Krude, Jan Rüth, Daniel Schemmel, Oliver Hohlfeld, Jó Ágila Bitsch, Klaus Wehrle. SymPerf: Predicting Network Function Performance. Proceedings of the 2017 SIGCOMM Posters and Demos. Presented at the ACM SIGCOMM 2017 Conference (SIGCOMM '17), Aug 22 - Aug 24, 2017, Los Angeles, CA, United States. August 2017.
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Martin Serror, Jörg Christian Kirchhof, Mirko Stoffers, Klaus Wehrle, James Gross. Code-transparent Discrete Event Simulation for Time-accurate Wireless Prototyping. Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGSIM Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation. Presented at the 2017 ACM SIGSIM Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation (SIGSIM-PADS '17), May 24 - May 26, 2017, Singapore, Singapore. May 2017.
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Mirko Stoffers, Daniel Schemmel, Oscar Soria Dustmann, Klaus Wehrle. Automated Memoization for Parameter Studies Implemented in Impure Languages. Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSIM Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation. Presented at the ACM Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation (SIGSIM-PADS '16), May 15 - May 18, 2016, Banff, AB, Canada. May 2016.
Best Paper Award
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Raimondas Sasnauskas, Philipp Kaiser, Russ Lucas Jukić, Klaus Wehrle. Integration Testing of Protocol Implementations using Symbolic Distributed Execution. Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Rigorous Protocol Engineering (WRiPE 2012), Oct 30 - Nov 2, 2012, Austin, TX, USA. October 2012.
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Oscar Soria Dustmann, Raimondas Sasnauskas, Klaus Wehrle. Position Paper: Symbolic System Time in Distributed Systems Testing. 2012 IEEE Fifth International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation. Presented at the 5th International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST '12). April 2012.
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Raimondas Sasnauskas, Oscar Soria Dustmann, Benjamin Lucien Kaminski, Carsten Weise, Stefan Kowalewski, Klaus Wehrle. Scalable Symbolic Execution of Distributed Systems. Proceedings of the 31st IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems. Presented at the 2011 31st International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS '11), Jun 20 - Jun 24, 2011, Minneapolis, MN, USA. June 2011.
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Fredrik Österlind, Raimondas Sasnauskas, Adam Dunkels, Oscar Soria Dustmann, Klaus Wehrle. Demo Abstract: Integrating Symbolic Execution with Sensornet Simulation for Efficient Bug Finding. Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems. Presented at the 8th ACM Conference on Embedded Network Sensor Systems (SenSys '10), Zurich, Switzerland. November 2010.
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Raimondas Sasnauskas, Olaf Landsiedel, Muhammad Hamad Alizai, Carsten Weise, Stefan Kowalewski, Klaus Wehrle. KleeNet: Discovering Insidious Interaction Bugs in Wireless Sensor Networks Before Deployment. Proceedings of the 9th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN 2010), Stockholm, Sweden. April 2010.
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Raimondas Sasnauskas, Jó Ágila Bitsch, Muhammad Hamad Alizai, Klaus Wehrle. Poster Abstract: KleeNet - Automatic Bug Hunting in Sensor Network Applications. Proceedings of the 6th ACM Conference on Embedded network sensor systems. Presented at the 6th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys '08), Raleigh, NC, United States. November 2008.
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Raimondas Sasnauskas, Jó Ágila Bitsch, Muhammad Hamad Alizai, Klaus Wehrle. Bug Hunting in Sensor Network Applications. Chair of Communication and Distributed Systems (ComSys), Berlin, Germany. September 2008.
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