Satisfaction Meets Practice and Confidence

The industrial application of formal methods and in particular of software verification tools, e.g. based on satisfiability checking and symbolic computation as being in the main focus of the SC network, necessitates two main requirements. The methods and tools, first, need to actually aim at the problem class that occur in practice and, second, have to guarantee a high level of confidence. In this position paper, we raise two challenges in the domain of software verification: 1) enhancing the field of application of software verification tools in practice by means of efficient support of IEEE-754-based floating-point models and 2) enhancing confidence of software verification tools by means of generating certificates for their computed analysis results. Keywords—formal specification; formal verification; model checking; floating-point; proof certificates