Accelerating software model checking based on program backbone

Abstract

Model checking technique has been gradually applied to verify the reliability of software systems. However, as to software with large scale and complex structure, the verification procedure suffers from the state space explosion, thus leading to a low efficiency or resource exhaustion. In this paper, we propose a method of accelerating software model checking based on program backbone to verify the properties in ANSI-C source codes. We prune the program with respect to the assertion property, and compress the circular paths by maximal strongly connected components to extract the program backbone. Subsequently, the Hoare theory is used to generate an invariant from the compressed circular nodes, which reduces the length of path encoding. The assertion property is finally translated into a quantifier-free formula and checked for satisfiability by the SMT solver Z3. The experiments show that this method substantially improves the efficiency of program verification. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.