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

Rocha, H.; BARRETO, R. S.; CORDEIRO, L. C.; Dias-Neto, A. C

2012 • 9th International Conference on Integrated Formal Methods • 23 citações

Resumo

One of the main challenges in software development is to ensure the correctness and reliability of software systems. In this sense, a system failure or malfunction can result in a catastrophe especially in critical embedded systems. In the context of software verification, bounded model checkers (BMCs) have already been applied to discover subtle errors in real projects. When a model checker finds an error, it produces a counter-example. On one hand, the value of counter-examples to debug software systems is widely recognized in the state-of-the-practice. On the other hand, model checkers often produce counter-examples that are either too large or difficult to be understood mainly because of the software size and the values chosen by the respective solver. This paper proposes a method with the purpose of automating the collection and manipulation of counter-examples in order to generate new instantiated code to reproduce the identified error. The proposed method may be seen as a complementary technique for the verification performed by state-of-the-art BMC tools. In particular, we used the ESBMC model checker to show the effectiveness of the proposed method over publicly available benchmarks and, additionally, a comparison with the tool Frama-C.

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