Software and Computational Systems Lab

Verifying complex programs with respect to a given specification (e.g., 'check that function reach_error is never called') may be time consuming. To make verifiers more applicable in industry, we want to tackle the problem with a divide-and-conquer approach. We decompose the verification task in multiple smaller tasks that are then verified in parallel. As soon as one of the analyses reports a violation, we abort all other analyses and report the violation. This will lead to many false alarms since we do not know with which input parameters functions will be called. Return values of functions will be ignored and interpreted as unknown value in a first step. From there we can continue in two directions:

1. Analyze functions under a user defined condition (e.g., a user restricts the values of parameter x of function foo to the interval [0;100])
2. We identify each function call automatically and try to infer all parameters.

1. The verification verdict should be available faster (in terms of passed walltime).
2. Wrong proofs should be non-existing. In case a program is safe, the decomposition should be a sound over-approximation.

CPAchecker is a framework for automatic software verification developed at our chair. As such it has a broad technology stack that should provides everything that is needed for verifying C programs. CPAchecker is able to distribute the analysis of a single task to different workers by decomposing the input program into blocks. Each worker analyzes one block and communicates the results to all other workers over messages to establish the correct verification result. In case we find a violation, fault localization can help to explain the root cause of the error. There already exist several techniques of fault localization in CPAchecker. Unfortunately, some of them may take long since they have to check 2^n possibilities in the worst-case scenario. By distributing fault localization to the relevant workers, 'n' shrinks since they work on smaller blocks. We expect a performance boost for fault localization after distributing it.

CPAchecker is a framework for automatic software verification developed at our chair. As such it has a broad technology stack that should provides everything that is needed for verifying C programs. CPAchecker is able to distribute the analysis of a single task to different workers by decomposing the input program into blocks. Each worker analyzes one block and communicates the results to all other workers over messages to establish the correct verification result. In case we find a violation, we want to provide the user with a counterexample that proves the reachability of a violation. Currently, neither the counterexample nor invariants can be synthesized from the messages. However, witnesses are important for improving the trust in the verfication results.

The SV-COMP benchmarks set is one of the largest benchmarks sets of C programs for software verification. For all programs in the set we know whether the program fulfills certain properties, e.g., the function 'reach_error' is never called. The benchmarks help to evaluate state-of-the-art verification tools and their effectiveness. For fault localization techniques there is no large benchmark set that provides sufficient metadata for each task to perform a large-scale evaluation. The idea is to create such tasks by manually crafting them, injecting faults in safe tasks, or identifiying fixes for unsafe tasks.