Formal verification of concurrent embedded software

Abstract

With the introduction of multicore hardware to embedded systems their vulnerability to race conditions has been drastically increased. Therefore, sufficient methods and techniques have to be developed in order to identify this kind of runtime errors. In this paper, we demonstrate an approach employing a formal technique in the verification process. We use MEMICS, which is a specialized constraint solver able to identify general runtime errors as well as race conditions. We show how this tool can be embedded into an existing software analysis tool chain. In particular, we describe the process of deriving the formal input model for the solver from C code. The advantage of using constraint solving techniques is that we can offer an entire trace leading to a race condition. The ongoing development of MEMICS is part of our work inside the ARAMiS project. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2013.