Cubicle: A Parallel SMT-Based Model Checker for Parameterized Systems

Abstract

Cubicle is a new model checker for verifying safety properties of parameterized systems. It implements a parallel symbolic backward reachability procedure using Satisfiabilty Modulo Theories. Experiments done on classic and challenging mutual exclusion algorithms and cache coherence protocols show that Cubicle is effective and competitive with state-of-the-art model checkers. 2 System Description Language Cubicle's input language is a typed version of Murϕ [8] similar to the one of Uclid [6], rudimentary at the moment, but more user-friendly than mcmt and sufficiently expressive for typical parameterized systems. A system is described in Cubicle by: (1) a set of type, variable, and array declarations; (2) a formula for the initial states; and (3) a set of transitions. It is parametrized by a set of process identifiers, denoted by the built-in type proc. Standard types int, real, and bool are also built in. Additionally, the user

Formal Specification and Verification of Dynamic Parametrized Architectures

“…As future work, we aim at trying other SMT-based model checkers such as Cubicle [13] and nuXmv [11]. We will investigate new algorithms that directly exploit the topology of the architecture.…”

“…We propose to use Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT)-based model checking for array-based transition systems [13,19], a syntactically restricted class of parametrized transition systems with states represented as arrays indexed by an arbitrary number of processes. We define carefully the fragment of first-order logic used in the architecture description so that we can provide a translation into array-based transition systems.…”

ParaVerifier: An Automatic Framework for Proving Parameterized Cache Coherence Protocols

“…Verification of parameterized systems (e.g., see [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11]) is interesting in the area of formal methods, mainly due to the practical importance of such systems. Parameterized systems exist in many application domains, including cache coherence protocols, security systems, and network communication protocols.…”

“…Many works have focused on the construction of a set of auxiliary invariants, for example, see [4,6,8,10,11]. However, the theoretical foundation of these techniques and their soundness proofs are often only discussed in the respective papers.…”

Invariants for finite instances and beyond

“…This is a syntactically restricted class of parametrized transition systems with states represented as arrays indexed by an arbitrary number of processes [19]. Our implementation is available in the Cubicle model checker [14].…”