54 research outputs found
Automated abstraction by incremental refinement in interpolant-based model checking
Abstract—This paper addresses the field of Unbounded Model
Checking (UMC) based on SAT engines, where Craig interpolants
have recently gained wide acceptance as an automated abstraction
technique.
We start from the observation that interpolants can be quite
effective on large verification instances. As they operate on
SAT-generated refutation proofs, interpolants are very good at
automatically abstract facts that are not significant for proofs.
In this work, we push forward the new idea of generating
abstractions without resorting to SAT proofs, and to accept
(reject) abstractions whenever they (do not) fulfill given adequacy
constraints. We propose an integrated approach smoothly
combining the capabilities of interpolation with abstraction and
over-approximation techniques, that do not directly derive from
SAT refutation proofs.
The driving idea of this combination is to incrementally
generate, by refinement, an abstract (over-approximate) image,
built up from equivalences, implications, ternary and localization
abstraction, then (eventually) from SAT refutation proofs.
Experimental results, derived from the verification of hard
problems, show the robustness of our approach
Efficient Interpolant Generation in Satisfiability Modulo Theories
The problem of computing Craig Interpolants for propositional (SAT) formulas has recently received a lot of interest, mainly for its applications in formal verification. However, propositional logic is often not expressive enough for representing many interesting verification problems, which can be more naturally addressed in the framework of Satisfiability Modulo Theories, SMT. Although {some} works have addressed the topic of generating interpolants in SMT, the techniques and tools that are currently available have some limitations, and their performance still does not exploit the full power of current state-of-the-art SMT solvers. In this paper we try to close this gap. We present several techniques for interpolant generation in SMT which overcome the limitations of the current generators mentioned above, and which take full advantage of state-of-the-art SMT technology. These novel techniques can lead to substantial performance improvements wrt. the currently available tools. We support our claims with an extensive experimental evaluation of our implementation of the proposed techniques in the MathSAT SMT solver
A Survey of Symbolic Execution Techniques
Many security and software testing applications require checking whether
certain properties of a program hold for any possible usage scenario. For
instance, a tool for identifying software vulnerabilities may need to rule out
the existence of any backdoor to bypass a program's authentication. One
approach would be to test the program using different, possibly random inputs.
As the backdoor may only be hit for very specific program workloads, automated
exploration of the space of possible inputs is of the essence. Symbolic
execution provides an elegant solution to the problem, by systematically
exploring many possible execution paths at the same time without necessarily
requiring concrete inputs. Rather than taking on fully specified input values,
the technique abstractly represents them as symbols, resorting to constraint
solvers to construct actual instances that would cause property violations.
Symbolic execution has been incubated in dozens of tools developed over the
last four decades, leading to major practical breakthroughs in a number of
prominent software reliability applications. The goal of this survey is to
provide an overview of the main ideas, challenges, and solutions developed in
the area, distilling them for a broad audience.
The present survey has been accepted for publication at ACM Computing
Surveys. If you are considering citing this survey, we would appreciate if you
could use the following BibTeX entry: http://goo.gl/Hf5FvcComment: This is the authors pre-print copy. If you are considering citing
this survey, we would appreciate if you could use the following BibTeX entry:
http://goo.gl/Hf5Fv
Counterexample-Guided Prophecy for Model Checking Modulo the Theory of Arrays
We develop a framework for model checking infinite-state systems by
automatically augmenting them with auxiliary variables, enabling
quantifier-free induction proofs for systems that would otherwise require
quantified invariants. We combine this mechanism with a counterexample-guided
abstraction refinement scheme for the theory of arrays. Our framework can thus,
in many cases, reduce inductive reasoning with quantifiers and arrays to
quantifier-free and array-free reasoning. We evaluate the approach on a wide
set of benchmarks from the literature. The results show that our implementation
often outperforms state-of-the-art tools, demonstrating its practical
potential.Comment: 23 pages, 1 figure, 1 table, extended version of paper to be
published in International Conference on Tools and Algorithms for the
Construction and Analysis of Systems 202
- …