Efficient symbolic execution of value-based data structures for critical systems

  • Authors:
  • Jason Belt; Robby;Patrice Chalin;John Hatcliff;Xianghua Deng

  • Affiliations:
  • Kansas State University, United States;Kansas State University, United States;Kansas State University, United States;Kansas State University, United States;Google Inc., United States

  • Venue:
  • NFM'12 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on NASA Formal Methods
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Symbolic execution shows promise for increasing the automation of verification tasks in certified safety/security-critical systems, where use of statically allocated value-based data structures is mandated. In fact Spark/Ada, a subset of Ada designed for verification and used for building critical systems, only permits data structures that are statically allocated. This paper describes a novel and efficient graph-based representation for programs making use of value-based data structures and procedure contracts. We show that our graph-based representation offers performance superior to a logic-based representation that is used in many approaches that delegate array reasoning to a decision procedure.