Reducer-Based Construction of Conditional Verifiers

Abstract

Despite recent advances, software verification remains challenging. To solve hard verification tasks, we need to leverage not just one but several different verifiers employing different technologies. To this end, we need to exchange information between verifiers. Conditional model checking was proposed as a solution to exactly this problem: The idea is to let the first verifier output a condition which describes the state space that it successfully verified and to instruct the second verifier to verify the yet unverified state space using this condition. However, most verifiers do not understand conditions as input. In this paper, we propose the usage of an off-the-shelf construction of a conditional verifier from a given traditional verifier and a reducer. The reducer takes as input the program to be verified and the condition, and outputs a residual program whose paths cover the unverified state space described by the condition. As a proof of concept, we designed and implemented one particular reducer and composed three conditional model checkers from the three best verifiers at SV-COMP 2017. We defined a set of claims and experimentally evaluated their validity. All experimental data and results are available for replication.