Exploiting Shared Structure in Software Verification Conditions

• Published in: Hardware and Software Vol. 4899; pp. 169 - 184
• Main Authors: Babić, Domagoj, Hu, Alan J.
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Germany Springer Berlin / Heidelberg 2008; Springer Berlin Heidelberg
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Abstract Syntax Tree; Decision Procedure; Model Check; Shared Structure; Static Check
• ISBN: 9783540779643; 3540779647
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-77966-7_15

Despite many advances, today’s software model checkers and extended static checkers still do not scale well to large code bases, when verifying properties that depend on complex interprocedural flow of data. An obvious approach to improve performance is to exploit software structure. Although a tremendous amount of work has been done on exploiting structure at various levels of granularity, the fine-grained shared structure among multiple verification conditions has been largely ignored. In this paper, we formalize the notion of shared structure among verification conditions, propose a novel and efficient approach to exploit this sharing, and provide experimental results that this approach can significantly improve the performance of verification, even on path- and context-sensitive and dataflow-intensive properties.