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The ASTRE?E Analyzer
Patrick Cousot 2, Radhia Cousot 1,3, Jero?me Feret 2, Laurent Mauborgne 2, Antoine Mine? 2, David Monniaux 1,2 Xavier Rival 2 1 CNRS 2 E?cole Normale Supe?rieure, Paris, France (Firstname.Lastname@ens.fr) 3 E?cole Polytechnique, Palaiseau, France (Firstname.Lastname@polytechnique.fr) http://www.astree.ens.fr/ Abstract. ASTRE?E is an abstract interpretation-based static program analyzer aiming at proving automatically the absence of run time errors in programs written in the C programming language. It has been applied with success to large embedded control-command safety critical real- time software generated automatically from synchronous specifications, producing a correctness proof for complex software without any false alarm in a few hours of computation. 1 Introduction Software development, testing, use, and evolution is nowadays a major concern in many machine-driven human activities. Despite progress in the science of computing and the engineering of software aiming at developing larger and more complex systems, incorrect software is not so uncommon and sometimes quite problematic. Hence, the design of sound and efficient formal program verifiers, which has been a long-standing problem, is a grand challenge for the forthcoming decades. All automatic proof methods involve some form of approximation of program execution, as formalized by abstract interpretation. They are sound but incom- plete whence subject to false alarms, that is desired properties that cannot be proved to hold, hence must be signaled as potential problems, even though they do hold at runtime. Although ASTRE?E addresses only part of the challenge, that of proving the absence of runtime errors in large embedded control-command safety critical real-time software generated automatically from synchronous specifications [1– 3], it is a promising first step, in that it was able to make the correctness proof for large and complex software by abstract-interpretation based stati