Translating Xd-C programs to MSVL programs

Abstract

C language is one of the most popular languages for software systems. In order to verify safety, reliability and security properties of such systems written in C, a tool UMC4M for runtime verification at code level based on Modeling, Simulation and Verification Language (MSVL) and its compiler MC is employed. To do so, a C program P has to be translated to an MSVL program M and the negation of a desired property Q is also translated to an MSVL program M', then “M and M'” is compiled and executed armed with MC. Whether P violates Q is checked by evaluating whether there exists an acceptable execution of new MSVL program “M and M'”. Therefore, how to translate a C program to an MSVL program is a critical issue. However, in general, C is of complicated structures with goto statement. In this paper, we confine the syntax of C in a suitable subset called Xd-C without loss of expressiveness. Further, we present a translation algorithm from an Xd-C program to an MSVL program based on translation algorithms for expressions and statements. Moreover, the equivalences between expressions and statements involved in Xd-C and MSVL programs are inductively proved. Subsequently, the equivalence between the original Xd-C program and the translated MSVL program is also proved. In addition, the proposed approach has been implemented by a tool called C2M. A benchmark of experiments including 13 real-world Xd-C programs is conducted. The results show that C2M works effectively.