Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Hewlett-packard Development Company, L.p.

Todd David Millstein

Thomas J Ball

Sriram K Rajamani

Rupak Majumdar

K Rustan M Leino

James Benjamin Saxe

Described is a method that enables the automatic generation of a boolean program that is a predicate abstraction of a program written using a general programming language. The method is capable of abstracting code statements within the program that include procedure calls, assignments, goto statements, conditionals, and pointers. In accordance with the invention, predicates of interest are identified for each code statement in the program. For each particular code statement, the process generates predicate statements that describe an effect that the statement has on the predicates of interest. If the effect of a particular code statement is indeterminable, non-deterministic predicate statements are included in the boolean program to model the indeterminable nature of the code statement. In addition, if a particular code statement includes a procedure call, the arguments and return value of the procedure call are translated to associated predicates in the calling context.

System and method for generating a predicate abstraction of a program

In a system for statically analyzing a specified computer, a verification condition generator converts the program into a logical equation, called a verification condition, and inserts program flow control labels into the sub-equations of the verification condition. The flow control labels identify conditional branch points in the specified computer program. A theorem prover is applied to the logical equation to determine truth of the logical equation, and when the truth of the logical equation cannot be proved, the theorem prover generates at least one counter-example identifying one of the conditions, one or more variable values inconsistent with that condition, and any of the flow control labels for conditional branch points of the program associated with the identified variable values. A post processing module converts each counter-example into an error message that includes a program trace when the counter-example identifies one or more of the flow control labels.

System and method for verifying computer program correctness and providing recoverable execution trace information

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Seattle, WA, United States of America

Todd David Millstein