Iterative abstraction refinement has emerged in the last few years as the leading approach to software model checking. We present an approach for automatically verifying C programs against safety specifications based on finite state machine. The approach eliminates unneeded variables using program slicing technique, and then automatically extracts an initial abstract model from C source code us...

We describe an automata-theoretic approach to the automatic verification of finite-state programs. The basic idea underlying this approach is that for any temporal formula we can construct an alternating automaton that accepts precisely the computations that satisfy the formula. For linear temporal logics the automaton runs on infinite words while for branching temporal logics the automaton run...

Practical program verification techniques must align with the software development methodologies that produce the programs. Researchers from several corners of software engineering have proposed similar models of program development in which modules encapsulate units of end-user functionality known as features. These models ameliorate some difficulties with conventional modular verification, su...

Dealing with aliasing is one of the key challenges for the verification of imperative programs. For instance, aliases make it difficult to determine which abstractions are potentially affected by a heap update and to determine which locks need to be acquired to avoid data races. Object ownership was one of the first approaches that allowed programmers to control aliasing and to restrict the ope...

The effectiveness of black-box system testing can be increased by automatic program verification techniques. For example, the redundancy of a test case can be detected by static analysis; the analysis must be applied to a program in the ‘whitebox’ layer of the system under test (e.g., in the setting of GUI testing, to the program which defines the event handlers). We will investigate the questi...

We present basic principles of algorithms for the verification of safety and termination of programs. The algorithms call procedures on logical formulas in order to construct an abstraction and to refine an abstraction. The two underlying concepts are predicate abstraction and counterexampleguided abstraction refinement. UC San Diego · University of Freiburg · Microsoft Research Cambridge · Tec...

Assertion checking is the restriction of program verification to validity of program assertions. It encompasses safety checking, which is program verification of safety properties, like memory safety or absence of overflows. In this paper, we consider assertion checking of program parts instead of whole programs, which we call modular assertion checking. Classically, modular assertion checking ...

Test-program generators play a key role in hardware functional verification of large scale processors. However, in the DSP domain, the usage of full-blown test-program generators is much less popular, mainly due to the limited resources (time and money) available when developing such systems. This paper describes a work-model for the fast, low cost construction of a test-program generator for D...

This paper reports on a method to handle the verification of various security properties of imperative source code embedded on smart cards. The idea is to combine two program verification approaches: the functional verification at the source code level and the verification of high level properties on a formal model built from the program and its specification. The method presented uses the Cadu...

A real-time program can be developed by refining a specification into program code. Verification of the timing properties of the program is then usually done at two levels: verification of the ordering of timed actions in the program and proof that execution of the program on a specific system will meet its timing requirements. Refinement is done within a formal model but the second step requir...