Certifying Hardware Model Checking Results

Abstract

Model checking is used widely as a formal verification technique for safety-critical systems. Certifying the correctness of model checking results helps increasing confidence in the verification procedure. This can be achieved by additional book-keeping inside existing model checkers. Based on this, we extended an existing BDD-based model checker as well as an IC3-based incremental inductive model checker, to generate certificates during the model checking procedure. We also introduce a proof checker which provides a standardised way to validate certificates generated from model checkers in conjunction with a SAT solver. The main goal is to establish a certification process for the hardware model checking competition.