A practical approach to formal software verification by static analysis

Abstract

Static analysis by Abstract Interpretation is a promising way for conducting formal verification of large software applications. In spite of recent successes in the verification of aerospace codes, this approach has limited industrial applicability due to the level of expertise required to engineer static analyzers. In this paper we investigate a pragmatic approach that consists of focusing on the most critical components of the application first. In this approach the user provides a description of the usage of functionalities in the critical component via a simple specification language, which is used to drive a fully automated static analysis engine. We present experimental results of the application of this approach to the verification of absence of buffer overflows in a critical library of the OpenSSH distribution.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Apr 01, 2008
Source ID
10.1145/1387830.1387836

Entities

People

  • Arnaud Venet

Organizations

  • Office of the Secretary of Defense

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Computer science
  • Engineering

Readers

  • Computer Science.
  • Cybersecurity.
  • Systems Analysis and Design

Technology Areas

  • Space