-OVERIFY: Optimizing Programs for Fast Verification

Authors: 

Jonas Wagner, Volodymyr Kuznetsov, and George Candea, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)

Abstract: 

Developers rely on automated testing and verification tools to gain confidence in their software. The input to such tools is often generated by compilers that have been designed to generate code that runs fast, not code that can be verified easily and quickly. This makes the verification tool’s task unnecessarily hard.

We propose that compilers support a new kind of switch,
-OVERIFY, that generates code optimized for the needs of verification tools. We implemented this idea for one class of verification (symbolic execution) and found that, when run on the Coreutils suite of UNIX utilities, it reduces verification time by up to 95x.

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BibTeX
@inproceedings {181961,
author = {Jonas Wagner and Volodymyr Kuznetsov and George Candea},
title = {-OVERIFY: Optimizing Programs for Fast Verification},
booktitle = {14th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS {XIV})},
year = {2013},
address = {Santa Ana Pueblo, NM},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/hotos13/session/wagner},
publisher = {{USENIX} Association},
month = may,
}
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