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Using Debuggers to Understand Failed Verification Attempts

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FM 2011: Formal Methods (FM 2011)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 6664))

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Abstract

Automatic program verification allows programmers to detect program errors at compile time. When an attempt to automatically verify a program fails the reason for the failure is often difficult to understand. Many program verifiers provide a counterexample of the failed attempt. These counterexamples are usually very complex and therefore not amenable to manual inspection. Moreover, the counterexample may be invalid, possibly misleading the programmer. We present a new approach to help the programmer understand failed verification attempts by generating an executable program that reproduces the failed verification attempt described by the counterexample. The generated program (1) can be executed within the program debugger to systematically explore the counterexample, (2) encodes the program semantics used by the verifier, which allows us to detect errors in specifications as well as in programs, and (3) contains runtime checks for all specifications, which allows us to detect spurious errors. Our approach is implemented within the Spec# programming system.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ETH Zurich, Switzerland

    Peter Müller & Joseph N. Ruskiewicz

Authors
  1. Peter Müller
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  2. Joseph N. Ruskiewicz
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Southampton, UK

    Michael Butler

  2. Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA

    Wolfram Schulte

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Müller, P., Ruskiewicz, J.N. (2011). Using Debuggers to Understand Failed Verification Attempts. In: Butler, M., Schulte, W. (eds) FM 2011: Formal Methods. FM 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6664. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21437-0_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21437-0_8

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-21436-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-21437-0

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