Practical symbolic verification of regular properties

Abstract

It is challenging to verify regular properties of programs. This paper presents symbolic regular verification (SRV), a dynamic symbolic execution based technique for verifying regular properties. The key technique of SRV is a novel synergistic combination of property-oriented path slicing and guiding to mitigate the path explosion problem. Indeed, slicing can prune redundant paths, while guiding can boost the finding of counterexamples. We have implemented SRV for Java and evaluated it on 16 real-world open-source Java programs (totaling 270K lines of code). The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of SRV.