Symbiotic 8 extends the traditional combination of static analyses, instrumentation, program slicing, and symbolic execution with one substantial novelty, namely a technique mixing symbolic execution with k-induction. This technique can prove the correctness of programs with possibly unbounded loops, which cannot be done by classic symbolic execution. Symbiotic 8 delivers also several other improvements. In particular, we have modified our fork of the symbolic executor Klee to support the comparison of symbolic pointers. Further, we have tuned the shape analysis tool Predator (integrated already in Symbiotic 7) to perform better on llvm bitcode. We have also developed a light-weight analysis of relations between variables that can prove the absence of out-of-bound accesses to arrays.
Symbiotic 7 brings improvements in all parts of the tool. In particular, we integrated the advanced shape analysis implemented in Predator to our instrumentation process for memory safety checking. Further, we extended our slicer to correctly handle non-terminating programs. This new slicing is applied in termination analysis, where we also added instrumentation for detection of simple cycles in the program state space. The witness generation process changed as well.
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