Symbolic object code analysis

Abstract

Current software model checkers quickly reach their limits when being applied to verifying pointer safety properties in source code that includes function pointers and inlined assembly. This paper introduces an alternative technique for checking pointer safety violations, called Symbolic Object Code Analysis (SOCA), which is based on bounded symbolic execution, incorporates path-sensitive slicing, and employs the SMT solver Yices as its execution and verification engine. Experimental results of a prototypic SOCA Verifier, using the Verisec suite and almost 10,000 Linux device driver functions as benchmarks, show that SOCA performs competitively to source-code model checkers and scales well when applied to real operating systems code and pointer safety issues.status: publishe