Verifying Full Regular Temporal Properties of Programs via Dynamic Program Execution

Abstract

Verification of programs at code level has attracted more and more attentions since the cost is high to extract models from source code. Most of approaches available for code level verification are carried out by inserting assertions into programs and then checking whether the assertions are violated. In this way, only safety properties can be verified, however, other temporal properties of programs such as liveness are hard to be verified. To tackle this problem, a novel runtime verification approach, which can verify full regular temporal properties of a program, is proposed in this paper. With this approach, a program to be verified is written in a modeling, simulation and verification language (MSVL) as a program M and a desired property is specified by a propositional projection temporal logic formula $P$ . The negation of the desired property is then translated to an MSVL program M’ . Thus, whether M violates $P$ can be checked by evaluating whether there exists an acceptable execution of the new MSVL program “ M and M’ .” This problem can efficiently be solved with the MSVL compiler where verification cases are generated via dynamic symbolic execution. Further, we adopt parallel mechanism to handle various execution paths of a program for improving the efficiency. The proposed approach has been implemented in a tool called MSV . Experiments show that the performance of MSV outperforms existing tools such as T2, RiTHM, and LTLAutomizer in verifying temporal properties of real-world programs.