Efficient reachability analysis of Büchi pushdown systems for hardware/software co-verification

Abstract

We present an efficient approach to reachability analysis of Büchi Pushdown System (BPDS) models for Hardware/Software (HW/SW) co-verificat-ion. This approach utilizes the asynchronous nature of the HW/SW interactions to reduce unnecessary HW/SW state transition orders being explored in co-verificat-ion. The reduction is applied when the verification model is constructed. We have realized this approach in our co-verification tool, CoVer, and applied it to the co-verification of two fully functional Windows device drivers with their device models respectively. Both of the drivers are open source and their original C code has been used. CoVer has proven seven safety properties and detected seven previously undiscovered software bugs. Evaluation shows that the reduction can significantly scale co-verification. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.