Understanding Programming Bugs in ANSI-C Software Using Bounded Model Checking Counter-Examples

Rocha, Herbert; Barreto, Raimundo; Cordeiro, Lucas C.; Neto, Arilo Dias

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-30729-4_10

Cited by 16 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…Counterexamples were exported by deriving full programs from counterexamples in order to provide them as input to another tool [11,14,41]. This approach is not feasible for witness validation because the witness needs to be checked against the original program.…”

Section: Error-testificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Witness validation and stepwise testification across software verifiers

Beyer

Dangl

Dietsch

et al. 2015

Proceedings of the 2015 10th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering

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It is commonly understood that a verification tool should provide a counterexample to witness a specification violation. Until recently, software verifiers dumped error witnesses in proprietary formats, which are often neither human-nor machine-readable, and an exchange of witnesses between different verifiers was impossible. To close this gap in softwareverification technology, we have defined an exchange format for error witnesses that is easy to write and read by verification tools (for further processing, e.g., witness validation) and that is easy to convert into visualizations that conveniently let developers inspect an error path. To eliminate manual inspection of false alarms, we develop the notion of stepwise testification: in a first step, a verifier finds a problematic program path and, in addition to the verification result false, constructs a witness for this path; in the next step, another verifier re-verifies that the witness indeed violates the specification. This process can have more than two steps, each reducing the state space around the error path, making it easier to validate the witness in a later step. An obvious application for testification is the setting where we have two verifiers: one that is efficient but imprecise and another one that is precise but expensive. We have implemented the technique of error-witness-driven program analysis in two state-of-the-art verification tools, CPAchecker and Ultimate Automizer, and show by experimental evaluation that the approach is applicable to a large set of verification tasks.

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Section: Error-testificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Witness validation and stepwise testification across software verifiers

Beyer

Dangl

Dietsch

et al. 2015

Proceedings of the 2015 10th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering

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“…We took part in the stateful verification, error-witness checking, and device-driver challenges tracks. In particular, we use EZProofC [6] to collect and manipulate the counterexample produced by ESBMC in order to reproduce the identified error for the first round (B1) of the error-witness checking. Acknowledgements.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Esbmc 1.22

Morse

Ramalho

Cordeiro

et al. 2014

Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems

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“…Test-Case Generation. The idea to generate test cases from verification counterexamples is more than ten years old [8,39], has since been used to create debuggable executables [31,33], and was extended and combined to various successful automatic test-case generation approaches [24,25,29,35].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

MetaVal: Witness Validation via Verification

Beyer

Spiessl

2020

Computer Aided Verification

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Witness validation is an important technique to increase trust in verification results, by making descriptions of error paths (violation witnesses) and important parts of the correctness proof (correctness witnesses) available in an exchangeable format. This way, the verification result can be validated independently from the verification in a second step. The problem is that there are unfortunately not many tools available for witness-based validation of verification results. We contribute to closing this gap with the approach of validation via verification, which is a way to automatically construct a set of validators from a set of existing verification engines. The idea is to take as input a specification, a program, and a verification witness, and produce a new specification and a transformed version of the original program such that the transformed program satisfies the new specification if the witness is useful to confirm the result of the verification. Then, an 'off-the-shelf' verifier can be used to validate the previously computed result (as witnessed by the verification witness) via an ordinary verification task. We have implemented our approach in the validator MetaVal, and it was successfully used in SV-COMP 2020 and confirmed 3 653 violation witnesses and 16 376 correctness witnesses. The results show that MetaVal improves the effectiveness (167 uniquely confirmed violation witnesses and 833 uniquely confirmed correctness witnesses) of the overall validation process, on a large benchmark set. All components and experimental data are publicly available.

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Understanding Programming Bugs in ANSI-C Software Using Bounded Model Checking Counter-Examples

Cited by 16 publications

References 8 publications

Witness validation and stepwise testification across software verifiers

Witness validation and stepwise testification across software verifiers

Esbmc 1.22

MetaVal: Witness Validation via Verification

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