Boosting Software Verification with Compiler Optimizations

Unlike testing, formal verification can not only prove the presence of errors, but their absence as well, thus making it suitable for verifying safety-critical systems. Formal verification may be performed by transforming the already implemented source code to a formal model and querying the resulting model on reachability of an erroneous state. Sadly, transformations from source code to a formal model often yield large and complex models, which may result in extremely high computational effort for a verifier algorithm. This paper describes a workflow that provides formal verification for C programs, aided by optimization techniques usually used in compiler design in order to reduce the size and complexity of a program and thus improve the performance of the verifier.