Differential Testing of Pushdown Reachability with a Formally Verified Oracle

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Pushdown automata are an essential model of recursive computation. In model checking and static analysis, numerous problems can be reduced to reachability questions about pushdown automata and several efficient libraries implement automata-theoretic algorithms for answering these questions. These libraries are often used as core components in other tools, and therefore it is instrumental that the used algorithms and their implementations are correct. We present a method that significantly increases the trust in the answers provided by the libraries for pushdown reachability by (i) formally verifying the correctness of the used algorithms using the Isabelle/HOL proof assistant, (ii) extracting executable programs from the formalization, (iii) implementing a framework for the differential testing of library implementations with the verified extracted algorithms as oracles, and (iv) automatically minimizing counter-examples from the differential testing based on the delta-debugging methodology. We instantiate our method to the concrete case of PDAAAL, a state-of-the-art library for pushdown reachability. Thereby, we discover and resolve several nontrivial errors in PDAAAL.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 22nd Conference on Formal Methods in Computer-Aided Design, FMCAD 2022
EditorsAlberto Griggio, Neha Rungta
PublisherTU Wien Academic Press
Publication date2022
Pages369-379
ISBN (Electronic)9783854480532
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2022
Event22nd International Conference on Formal Methods in Computer-Aided Design, FMCAD 2022 - Trento, Italy
Duration: 17 Oct 202221 Oct 2022

Conference

Conference22nd International Conference on Formal Methods in Computer-Aided Design, FMCAD 2022
LandItaly
ByTrento
Periode17/10/202221/10/2022

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 FMCAD Association and authors.

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