Abstract
VCC [2] is an industrial-strength verification environment for low-level concurrent systems code written in C. VCC takes a program (annotated with function contracts, state assertions, and type invariants) and attempts to prove the correctness of these annotations. VCC’s verification methodology [4] allows global two-state invariants that restrict update of shared state and enforces simple, semantic conditions sufficient for checking those global invariants modularly. VCC works by translating C, via Boogie [1] intermediate verification language, to verification conditions handled by the Z3 [5] SMT solver.
The environment includes tools for monitoring proof attempts and constructing partial counterexample executions for failed proofs and has been used to verify functional correctness of tens of thousands of lines of Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization platform and of SYSGOs embedded real-time operating system PikeOS.
In this talk, I am going to showcase various tools that come with VCC: the verifier itself, VCC Visual Studio plugin, and Boogie Verification Debugger. I am going to cover the basics of VCC’s verification methodology on various examples: concurrency primitives, lock-free data-structures, and recursive data-structures.
The sources and binaries of VCC are available for non-commercial use at http://vcc.codeplex.com/ . A tutorial [3] is also provided. VCC can be also tried online at http://rise4fun.com/Vcc .
Access provided by Autonomous University of Puebla. Download to read the full chapter text
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
References
Barnett, M., Chang, B.-Y.E., DeLine, R., Jacobs, B., Leino, K.R.M.: Boogie: A modular reusable verifier for object-oriented programs. In: de Boer, F.S., Bonsangue, M.M., Graf, S., de Roever, W.-P. (eds.) FMCO 2005. LNCS, vol. 4111, pp. 364–387. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Cohen, E., Dahlweid, M., Hillebrand, M.A., Leinenbach, D., Moskal, M., Santen, T., Schulte, W., Tobies, S.: VCC: A practical system for verifying concurrent C. In: Berghofer, S., Nipkow, T., Urban, C., Wenzel, M. (eds.) TPHOLs 2009. LNCS, vol. 5674, pp. 23–42. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Cohen, E., Hillebrand, M.A., Moskal, M., Schulte, W., Tobies, S.: Verifying C programs: A VCC tutorial. Working draft, http://vcc.codeplex.com/
Cohen, E., Moskal, M., Schulte, W., Tobies, S.: Local verification of global invariants in concurrent programs. In: Touili, T., Cook, B., Jackson, P. (eds.) CAV 2010. LNCS, vol. 6174, pp. 480–494. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
de Moura, L.M., Bjørner, N.: Z3: An efficient SMT solver. In: Ramakrishnan, C.R., Rehof, J. (eds.) TACAS 2008. LNCS, vol. 4963, pp. 337–340. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Moskal, M. (2011). Verifying Functional Correctness of C Programs with VCC. In: Bobaru, M., Havelund, K., Holzmann, G.J., Joshi, R. (eds) NASA Formal Methods. NFM 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6617. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20398-5_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20398-5_5
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-20397-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-20398-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)