SMT-Based Refutation of Spurious Bug Reports in the Clang Static Analyzer

October 29, 2018 · The Ethereal · 🏛 2019 IEEE/ACM 41st International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings (ICSE-Companion)

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Authors Mikhail R. Gadelha, Enrico Steffinlongo, Lucas C. Cordeiro, Bernd Fischer, Denis A. Nicole arXiv ID 1810.12041 Category cs.LO: Logic in CS Cross-listed cs.PL, cs.SE Citations 20 Venue 2019 IEEE/ACM 41st International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings (ICSE-Companion) Last Checked 1 month ago

Abstract

We describe and evaluate a bug refutation extension for the Clang Static Analyzer (CSA) that addresses the limitations of the existing built-in constraint solver. In particular, we complement CSA's existing heuristics that remove spurious bug reports. We encode the path constraints produced by CSA as Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) problems, use SMT solvers to precisely check them for satisfiability, and remove bug reports whose associated path constraints are unsatisfiable. Our refutation extension refutes spurious bug reports in 8 out of 12 widely used open-source applications; on average, it refutes ca. 7% of all bug reports, and never refutes any true bug report. It incurs only negligible performance overheads, and on average adds 1.2% to the runtime of the full Clang/LLVM toolchain. A demonstration is available at {\tt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylW5iRYNsGA}.