Automatic Model Extraction from C Code—Abstracter and Architecture

Abstract

Today’s digitized world are completely dependent on softwares and the cost of programming errors for these softwares are increasing on a daily basis. C is one of the most popular programming language and has been widely used in developing safety critical softwares, embedded systems, etc. In spite of the fact that the area of formally verifying a code is quite rich, but still not much research has gone in the direction of automatically extracting the model from a code. SPIN model (Holzmann in SPIN model checker, the primer and reference manual. Addison Wesley, Boston, 2003, [1]) checker is one of the world’s most popular model checkers, and arguably one of the world’s most powerful tool for detecting software defects in concurrent system designs. However, SPIN is incapable of checking C programs directly, rather it accepts a specification language called Promela. In this paper, we provide an architectural overview of automatically extracting Promela model from programs written in C. The proposed architecture also provides scope for abstraction to handle state space exploration problem. In fact, we propose unified solutions for data hiding and data narrowing, the two most important techniques of program abstraction based on Generalized Program Graph (Debnath in A new abstraction for the study of module interaction, pp. 181–189, 1991, [12]).