Bounded Model Checking for C programs in an enterprise environment

Michael Tautschnig

Research Scientist at Amazon Web Services and Lecturer in Theoretical Computer Science at Queen Mary, University of London

Software model checking tools promise to deliver genuine traces to errors, andsometimes even proofs of their absence. As static analysers, they do not requireconcrete execution of programs, which may be even more beneficial when targetingnew platforms. Academic research focusses on improving scalability, yet largelydisregards practical technical challenges to make tools cope with real-worldcode. At Amazon, both scalability requirements as well as real-world constraintsapply. Our prior work analysing more than 25,000 software packages in theDebian/GNU Linux distribution containing more than 400 million lines of C codenot only led to more than 700 public bug reports, but also provided a solidpreparation for the challenges at Amazon.

About Michael Tautschnig

Michael Tautschnig is a Research Scientist at Amazon Web Services and Lecturer at Queen Mary University of London. He obtained his PhD from Vienna University of Technology, developing an efficient, systematic and automatic test input generation technique for C programs. Prior to his appointment as lecturer at QMU he was a post-doctoral research assistant at the University of Oxford. A year ago he also joined Byron Cook's group at Amazon Web Services to apply his research at scale.His current and recent research focusses automating verification for real-world software at large scale, and efficient software verification techniques for concurrent, shared-memory systems with relaxed memory models.

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