-Overify: Optimizing programs for fast verification

Jonas Wagner, Volodymyr Kuznetsov, George Candea
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Read: 18 November 2019

14th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems
2013
Topic(s): tools verification
Note(s): KLEE verifier
Papers: cadar:fse:2015

This paper explores the benefit of using different optimization options (or even custom transformations) when compiling a program for optimization. Their optimization options are over 5000x better than -O0 and 14x better than -O3 for verification using KLEE on their motivating example. Compared with -O3, their main goal is to reduce the amount of information lost during compilation. They mention but do little to address the problem of undefined behaviour in C causing different compilations to behave differently although they did look for this in their evaluation and found that they detected the same bugs with -O0, -O3 and -Overify.

The paper identifies transformations that have a positive or negative effect on verification. Optimizations discussed are:

  • unswitching loops
  • loop unrolling
  • function inlining
  • copy propagation
  • constant folding
  • allocating variables in registers
  • splitting large objects
  • preserving information from the compiler: alias information, variable ranges, loop invariants, trip counts, type information
  • inserting runtime checks
  • using a simplified library (as KLEE already does).

And optimizations that make verification worse are CPU specific optimizations, cache optimizations, padding objects.

One of the payoffs from reading this paper is that I had naïvely expected that the -O0 version would be easier to verify than the -O2 or -O3 version. At least when using KLEE, this is not true.


Verifier performance

  • Targeted program transformations for symbolic execution [cadar:fse:2015]