Development and evaluation of LAV: An SMT-based error finding platform: System description

Abstract

We present design and evaluation of LAV, a new open-source tool for statically checking program assertions and errors. LAV integrates into the popular LLVM infrastructure for compilation and analysis. LAV uses symbolic execution to construct a first-order logic formula that models the behavior of each basic blocks. It models the relationships between basic blocks using propositional formulas. By combining these two kinds of formulas LAV generates polynomial-sized verification conditions for loop-free code. It uses underapproximating or overapproximating unrolling to handle loops. LAV can pass generated verification conditions to one of the several SMT solvers: Boolector, MathSAT, Yices, and Z3. Our experiments with small 200 benchmarks suggest that LAV is competitive with related tools, so it can be used as an effective alternative for certain verification tasks. The experience also shows that LAV provides significant help in analyzing student programs and providing feedback to students in everyday university practice. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.