Scaling Client-Specific Equivalence Checking via Impact Boundary Search

Abstract

Client-specific equivalence checking (CSEC) is a technique proposed previously to perform impact analysis of changes to downstream components (libraries) from the perspective of an unchanged system (client). Existing analysis techniques, whether general (re-gression verification, equivalence checking) or special-purpose, when applied to CSEC, either require users to provide specifications, or do not scale. We propose a novel solution to the CSEC problem, called 2clever, that is based on searching the control-flow of a program for impact boundaries. We evaluate a prototype implementation of 2clever on a comprehensive set of benchmarks and conclude that our prototype performs well compared to the state-of-the-art.