Publication details
Case Study on Verification-Witness Validators: Where We Are and Where We Go
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2022 |
| Type | Article in Proceedings |
| Conference | Static Analysis - 29th International Symposium, SAS 2022, Auckland, New Zealand, December 5–7, 2022, Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Web | https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-22308-2_8 |
| Doi | http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22308-2_8 |
| Keywords | software verification;program analysis;software validation;software bugs;verification witnesses;evaluation;benchmarking |
| Description | Software-verification tools sometimes produce incorrect answers, which can be a false alarm or a wrong claim of correctness. To increase the reliability of verification results, many verifiers now accompany their answers by witnesses in an interoperable standard format. There exist witness validators that can examine the witnesses and potentially confirm the verification results. This case study analyzes the quality of existing witness validators for C programs using the witnesses produced by a wide variety of 40 verification tools that participated in SV-COMP 2022. In particular, we show that many witness validators sometimes confirm witnesses that are invalid. To remedy this situation, we suggest some advances in witness validation, including a regular comparative evaluation of validators. Our suggestions were recently adopted by the SV-COMP community for the next edition of the competition. |