Applicability of the BLAST Model Checker: An Industrial Case Study

Kolb, Emanuel; Šerý, Ondřej; Weiß, Roland

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-11486-1_19

Cited by 3 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…There have been several studies in which an SMC was applied to various target systems such as automotive software [47], microcontroller programs [48], Linux device drivers [45], [46], file systems [52], network filters [13], a protocol stack [40], and server applications [41]. For a flash storage platform, which is our main target domain, one recent study [32] analyzes flash file systems as an effort of the mini-challenge [35].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The authors in [32] suspected that heavy use of complex data structure in the file system might cause failures to SMCs, which was similarly observed in our case study. Kolb et al [40] used Blast to verify the components of the Object linking and embedding for Process Control Unified Architecture (OPC UA) [42] protocol stack with regard to lock policy, message context management, and encoder management. They reported that several bugs were detected in a few seconds to a few minutes, but tool failures and false alarms were observed as well.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, in spite of the well-known success of the CEGAR-based SMC on Windows device drivers [5], there are case studies that report the limitations of a CEGAR-based SMC in which the inaccurate handling of arrays [41] and pointers [40], [45] is outlined (see Section 8.2 and Section 9.2).…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Comparative Study of Software Model Checkers as Unit Testing Tools: An Industrial Case Study

Kim

2011

IIEEE Trans. Software Eng.

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Abstract-Conventional testing methods often fail to detect hidden flaws in complex embedded software such as device drivers or file systems. This deficiency incurs significant development and support/maintenance cost for the manufacturers. Model checking techniques have been proposed to compensate for the weaknesses of conventional testing methods through exhaustive analyses. Whereas conventional model checkers require manual effort to create an abstract target model, modern software model checkers remove this overhead by directly analyzing a target C program, and can be utilized as unit testing tools. However, since software model checkers are not fully mature yet, they have limitations according to the underlying technologies and tool implementations, potentially critical issues when applied in industrial projects. This paper reports our experience in applying Blast and CBMC to testing the components of a storage platform software for flash memory. Through this project, we analyzed the strong and weak points of two different software model checking technologies in the viewpoint of real-world industrial application-counterexample-guided abstraction refinement with predicate abstraction and SAT-based bounded analysis.Index Terms-Embedded software verification, software model checking, bounded model checking, CEGAR-based model checking, flash file systems.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Comparative Study of Software Model Checkers as Unit Testing Tools: An Industrial Case Study

Kim

2011

IIEEE Trans. Software Eng.

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“…great strides have been made in the development of efficient model checking that scales to large programs. Software model checkers such as BLAST [5] and CPAChecker [13], [12] have achieved impressive success in recent software verification competitions [26], [27], [29], [30], [31]. However (see Section V for details), the development of precise and scalable model checking tools that are fit for real-world applications remains a daunting challenge.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

More effective interpolations in software model checking

Tian

Zhao

Duan

et al. 2017

2017 32nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE)

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An approach to CEGAR-based model checking which has proved to be successful on large models employs Craig interpolation to efficiently construct parsimonious abstractions. Following this design, we introduce new applications, universal safety interpolant and existential error interpolant, of Craig interpolation that can systematically reduce the program state space to be explored for safety verification. Whenever the universal safety interpolant is implied by the current path, all paths emanating from that location are guaranteed to be safe. Dually whenever the existential error interpolant is implied by the current path, there is guaranteed to be an unsafe path from the location. We show how these interpolants are computed and applied in safety verification. We have implemented our approach in a tool named INTERPCHECKER by building on an open source software model checker. Experiments on a large number of benchmark programs show that both the interpolations and the auxiliary optimization strategies are effective in improving scalability of software model checking.

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