Statically relating program properties for efficient verification (short WIP paper)

Efficient automatic verification of real world embedded software with numerous properties is a challenge. Existing techniques verify a sufficient subset of properties by identifying implication relations between their verification outcomes. We believe this is expensive and propose a novel complementary approach called grouping. Grouping does not consider the verification outcomes but uses data and control flow characteristics of the program to create disjoint groups of properties verifiable one group at a time.We present three grouping techniques, a framework, and experiments over open source and industrial applications to support our thesis. The experiments show a high gain in performance of a few state-of-the-art tools. This led to the integration of grouping into the verification process of an automotive software manufacturer.