Abstract pathfinder

Abstract

We present Abstract Pathfinder, an extension to the Java Pathfinder (JPF) verification tool-set that supports data abstraction to reduce the large data domains of a Java program to small, finite abstract domains, making the program more amenable to verification. We use data abstraction to compute an over-approximation of the original program in such a way that if a (safety) property is true in the abstracted program the property is also true in the original program. Our approach enhances JPF with an abstract interpreter and abstract state-matching mechanisms, together with a library of abstractions from which the user can pick which abstractions to use for a particular application. We discuss the details of our implementation together with some preliminary experiments with analyzing multi-threaded Java programs, where Abstract Pathfinder achieves significant time and memory savings as compared with plain JPF.