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International Conference on Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems

TACAS 2020: Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems pp 3–21Cite as

Software Verification with PDR: An Implementation of the State of the Art

Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNTCS,volume 12078)

Abstract

Property-directed reachability (PDR) is a SAT/SMT-based reachability algorithm that incrementally constructs inductive invariants. After it was successfully applied to hardware model checking, several adaptations to software model checking have been proposed. We contribute a replicable and thorough comparative evaluation of the state of the art: We (1) implemented a standalone PDR algorithm and, as improvement, a PDR-based auxiliary-invariant generator for k-induction, and (2) performed an experimental study on the largest publicly available benchmark set of C verification tasks, in which we explore the effectiveness and efficiency of software verification with PDR. The main contribution of our work is to establish a reproducible baseline for ongoing research in the area by providing a well-engineered reference implementation and an experimental evaluation of the existing techniques.

Keywords

  • Software verification
  • Program analysis
  • Invariant generation
  • Property-directed reachability (PDR)
  • IC3
  • k-Induction
  • VVT
  • CPAchecker

An extended version of this article is available as technical report [8].

A replication package is available on Zenodo [9].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. LMU Munich, Munich, Germany

    Dirk Beyer & Matthias Dangl

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  1. Dirk Beyer
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  2. Matthias Dangl
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Correspondence to Dirk Beyer .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria

    Prof. Armin Biere

  2. University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

    Prof. David Parker

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Beyer, D., Dangl, M. (2020). Software Verification with PDR: An Implementation of the State of the Art. In: Biere, A., Parker, D. (eds) Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems. TACAS 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12078. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45190-5_1

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