Abstract. This paper presents a model checking tool, SatAbs, that implements a predicate abstraction refinement loop. Existing software verification tools such as Slam, Blast, or Magic use decision procedures for abstraction and simulation that are limited to integers. SatAbs overcomes these limitations by using a SAT-solver. This allows the model checker to handle the semantics of the ANSI-C standard accurately. This includes a sound treatment of bit-vector overflow, and of the ANSI-C pointer arithmetic constructs.

Predicate abstraction is a major method for verification of software. However, the generation of the abstract Boolean program from the set of predicates and the original program suffers from an exponential number of theorem prover calls as well as from soundness issues. This paper presents a novel technique that uses an efficient SAT solver for generating the abstract transition relations of ANSI-C programs. The SAT-based approach computes a more precise and safe abstraction compared to existing predicate abstraction techniques.

We present an algorithm that checks behavioral consistency between an ANSI-C program and a circuit given in Verilog using Bounded Model Checking. Both the circuit and the program are unwound and translated into a formula that is satisfiable if and only if the circuit and the code disagree. The formula is then checked using a SAT solver. We are able to translate C programs that make use of side effects, pointers, dynamic memory allocation, and loops with conditions that cannot be evaluated statically. We describe experimental results on various reactive circuits and programs, including a small processor given in Verilog and its Instruction Set Architecture given in ANSI-C.

There has been considerable progress in the domain of software verification over the last few years. This advancement has been driven, to a large extent, by the emergence of powerful yet automated abstraction techniques like predicate abstraction. However, the state space explosion problem in model checking remains the chief obstacle to the practical verification of real-world distributed systems. Even in the case of purely sequential programs, a crucial requirement to make predicate abstraction effective is to use as few predicates as possible. This is because, in the worst case, the state space of the abstraction generated (and consequently the time and memory complexity of the abstraction process) is exponential in the number of predicates involved. In addition, for concurrent programs, the number of reachable states could grow exponentially with the number of components.We attempt to address these issues in the context of verifying concurrent (message-passing) C programs against safety specifications. More specifically, we present a fully automated compositional framework which combines two orthogonal abstraction techniques (predicate abstraction for data and action-guided abstraction for events) within a counterexample-guided abstraction refinement scheme. In this way, our algorithm incrementally increases the granularity of the abstractions until the specification is either established or refuted. Additionally, a key feature of our approach is that if a property can be proven to hold or not hold based on a given finite set of predicates P, the predicate refinement procedure we propose in this article finds automatically a minimal subset of P that is sufficient for the proof. This, along with our explicit use of compositionality, delays the onset of state space explosion for as long as possible. We describe our approach in detail, and report on some very encouraging experimental results obtained with our tool magic.

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