Evaluating software verification systems: benchmarks and competitions

This report documents the program and the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 14171 “Evaluating Software Verification Systems: Benchmarks and Competitions”. The seminar brought together a large group of current and future competition organizers and participants, benchmark maintainers, as well as practitioners and researchers interested in the topic. The seminar was conducted as a highly interactive event, with a wide spectrum of contributions from participants, including talks, tutorials, posters, tool demonstrations, hands-on sessions, and a live competition

Proving Safety with Trace Automata and Bounded Model Checking

Loop under-approximation is a technique that enriches C programs with additional branches that represent the effect of a (limited) range of loop iterations. While this technique can speed up the detection of bugs significantly, it introduces redundant execution traces which may complicate the verification of the program. This holds particularly true for verification tools based on Bounded Model Checking, which incorporate simplistic heuristics to determine whether all feasible iterations of a loop have been considered. We present a technique that uses \emph{trace automata} to eliminate redundant executions after performing loop acceleration. The method reduces the diameter of the program under analysis, which is in certain cases sufficient to allow a safety proof using Bounded Model Checking. Our transformation is precise---it does not introduce false positives, nor does it mask any errors. We have implemented the analysis as a source-to-source transformation, and present experimental results showing the applicability of the technique

Predicting SMT solver performance for software verification

The approach Why3 takes to interfacing with a wide variety of interactive and automatic theorem provers works well: it is designed to overcome limitations on what can be proved by a system which relies on a single tightly-integrated solver. In common with other systems, however, the degree to which proof obligations (or “goals”) are proved depends as much on the SMT solver as the properties of the goal itself. In this work, we present a method to use syntactic analysis to characterise goals and predict the most appropriate solver via machine-learning techniques. Combining solvers in this way - a portfolio-solving approach - maximises the number of goals which can be proved. The driver-based architecture of Why3 presents a unique opportunity to use a portfolio of SMT solvers for software verification. The intelligent scheduling of solvers minimises the time it takes to prove these goals by avoiding solvers which return Timeout and Unknown responses. We assess the suitability of a number of machinelearning algorithms for this scheduling task. The performance of our tool Where4 is evaluated on a dataset of proof obligations. We compare Where4 to a range of SMT solvers and theoretical scheduling strategies. We find that Where4 can out-perform individual solvers by proving a greater number of goals in a shorter average time. Furthermore, Where4 can integrate into a Why3 user’s normal workflow - simplifying and automating the non-expert use of SMT solvers for software verification

TOOLympics 2019: An Overview of Competitions in Formal Methods

Evaluation of scientific contributions can be done in many different ways. For the various research communities working on the verification of systems (software, hardware, or the underlying involved mechanisms), it is important to bring together the community and to compare the state of the art, in order to identify progress of and new challenges in the research area. Competitions are a suitable way to do that. The first verification competition was created in 1992 (SAT competition), shortly followed by the CASC competition in 1996. Since the year 2000, the number of dedicated verification competitions is steadily increasing. Many of these events now happen regularly, gathering researchers that would like to understand how well their research prototypes work in practice. Scientific results have to be reproducible, and powerful computers are becoming cheaper and cheaper, thus, these competitions are becoming an important means for advancing research in verification technology. TOOLympics 2019 is an event to celebrate the achievements of the various competitions, and to understand their commonalities and differences. This volume is dedicated to the presentation of the 16 competitions that joined TOOLympics as part of the celebration of the 25th anniversary of the TACAS conference