A Static Analyzer for Large Safety-Critical Software

Bruno Blanchet, Patrick Cousot, Radhia Cousot, Jérôme Feret, Laurent Mauborgne, Antoine Miné, David Monniaux and Xavier Rival.
A Static Analyzer for Large Safety-Critical Software.
In ACM SIGPLAN 2003 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI'03), ACM Press, pages 196--207.
ACM, 2003.
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Abstract: We show that abstract interpretation-based static program analysis can be made efficient and precise enough to formally verify a class of properties for a family of large programs with few or no false alarms. This is achieved by refinement of a general purpose static analyzer and later adaptation to particular programs of the family by the end-user through parameterization. This is applied to the proof of soundness of data manipulation operations at the machine level for periodic synchronous safety critical embedded software. The main novelties are the design principle of static analyzers by refinement and adaptation through parameterization (Sect. 3 and 7), the symbolic manipulation of expressions to improve the precision of abstract transfer functions (Sect. 6.3), the octagon (Sect. 6.2.2), ellipsoid (Sect. 6.2.3), and decision tree (Sect. 6.2.4) abstract domains, all with sound handling of rounding errors in floating point computations, widening strategies (with thresholds: Sect. 7.1.2, delayed: Sect. 7.1.3) and the automatic determination of the parameters (parameterized packing: Sect. 7.2).

\bibitem{bccfmmmr03}
{\sc Blanchet, B., Cousot, P., Cousot, R., Feret, J., Mauborgne, L., Miné, A., 
     Monniaux, D., and Rival, X.}
\newblock A static analyzer for large safety-critical software.
\newblock In {\em ACM SIGPLAN 2003 Conference on Programming Language Design
  and Implementation (PLDI'03)}, pages 196--207, San Diego, California, USA,
  June 9--11 2003. ACM Press.

@inproceedings{bccfmmmr03,
author = "Bruno Blanchet and Patrick Cousot and Radhia Cousot and J{\'e}r{\^o}me
         Feret and Laurent Mauborgne and Antoine Min{\'e} and David Monniaux
         and Xavier Rival",
title = "A Static Analyzer for Large Safety-Critical Software",
booktitle = "ACM SIGPLAN 2003 Conference on Programming Language Design and 
    Implementation (PLDI'03)",
year = 2003,
pages = "196--207",
publisher = "ACM Press",
address = "San Diego, California, USA",
month = "June 9--11"
}

Email: Laurent.Mauborgne@ens.fr