Efficient verification of multi-property designs (The benefit of wrong assumptions)

Abstract

We consider the problem of efficiently checking a set of safety properties P 1 , . . . , P k of one design. We introduce a new approach called JA-verification, where JA stands for "Just-Assume" (as opposed to "assume-guarantee"). In this approach, when proving a property P i , one assumes that every property P j for j = i holds. The process of proving properties either results in showing that P 1 , . . . , P k hold without any assumptions or finding a "debugging set" of properties. The latter identifies a subset of failed properties that are the first to break. The design behaviors that cause the properties in the debugging set to fail must be fixed first. Importantly, in our approach, there is no need to prove the assumptions used. We describe the theory behind our approach and report experimental results that demonstrate substantial gains in performance, especially in the cases where a small debugging set exists. * This is an extended version of the paper published at DATE-2018.

AVR: Abstractly Verifying Reachability

“…Since proof certificates are in the word-level format, they are human-readable and much easier to relate to the word-level input directly at the source-code level (as against bit-level invariants which are usually too hard to understand). Proof certificates have many useful applications, including the derivation of inductive validity cores [32], gaining deeper insights on design behavior, deriving assume-guarantee verification conditions [37,53], deriving helper assertions during multi-property verification [36,29], and generalizing to quantified domains (as elaborated later in §4.3).…”

Conquering the extensional scalability problem for value-flow analysis frameworks

“…To the best of our knowledge, a very limited number of existing static analyses have studied how to statically check multiple program properties at once, despite that the problem is very important at an industrial setting. Goldberg et al [26] make unsound assumptions and intentionally stop the analysis on a path after finding the first bug. Apparently, the approach will miss many bugs, which violates our design goal.…”

Systematic Classification of Attackers via Bounded Model Checking

“…al [13], and Cabodi and Nocco [14] present several useful techniques that can be used to improve the performance of model checking when verifying multiple properties, including COI reduction and property clustering. We also mention the work by Goldberg et al [20] where they consider the problem of efficiently checking a set of safety properties P 1 to P k by individually checking each property while assuming that all other properties are valid. Ultimately, all these works inspired us to incrementally check requirements in the same cluster, helping us transform Equation 4 into Equation 7.…”