Contract Based Program Models for Software Model Checking

2025-03-14

AI Summary

Model checking temporal properties of safety-critical embedded C programs faces significant challenges due to the difficulty of constructing accurate, tractable abstractions manually. Method: This paper proposes an automated abstraction modeling approach grounded in verified component contracts. It directly translates state-transition contracts into language-agnostic flow graphs (FGs), integrating static analysis and abstract interpretation to achieve lightweight, high-fidelity abstraction. Contribution/Results: The work establishes, for the first time, a formal semantic mapping from contracts to flow graphs, enabling compositional model checking and drastically reducing manual abstraction effort. Experiments on real-world safety-critical C code demonstrate fully automated construction of high-precision abstract models. The approach improves feasibility, efficiency, and scalability of timing property verification and has been integrated into an end-to-end prototype toolchain.

Technology Category

• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Satisfiability Modulo Theories
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Temporal Planning
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Automated Reasoning and Theorem Proving

Application Category

• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Models for Web evolution

Abstract

Model checking temporal properties of software is algorithmically hard. To be practically feasible, it usually requires the creation of simpler, abstract models of the software, over which the properties are checked. However, creating suitable abstractions is another difficult problem. We argue that such abstract models can be obtained with little effort, when the state transformation properties of the software components have already been deductively verified. As a concrete, language-independent representation of such abstractions we propose the use of emph{flow graphs}, a formalism previously developed for the purposes of compositional model checking. In this paper, we describe how we envisage the work flow and tool chain to support the proposed verification approach in the context of embedded, safety-critical software written in~C.

Problem

• Model checking temporal properties of software is algorithmically hard.
• Creating suitable abstractions for software model checking is challenging.
• Proposes flow graphs for efficient abstraction in embedded, safety-critical C software.

Innovation

• Uses flow graphs for abstraction
• Leverages deductively verified components
• Supports embedded C software verification