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The MISRA project started in 1990 with the mission of providing world-leading best practice guidelines for the safe and secure application of both embedded control systems and standalone software. MISRA C is a coding standard defining a subset of the C language, initially targeted at the automotive sector, but now adopted across all industry sectors that develop C software in safety- and/or security-critical contexts. In this paper, we introduce MISRA C, its role in the development of critical software, especially in embedded systems, its relevance to industry safety standards, as well as the challenges of working with a general-purpose programming language standard that is written in natural language with a slow evolution over the last 40+ years. We also outline the role of static analysis in the automatic checking of compliance with respect to MISRA C, and the role of the MISRA C language subset in enabling a wider application of formal methods to industrial software written in C.

Convex polyhedra are the basis for several abstractions used in static analysis and computer-aided verification of complex and sometimes mission critical systems. For such applications, the identification of an appropriate complexity-precision trade-off is a particularly acute problem, so that the availability of a wide spectrum of alternative solutions is mandatory. We survey the range of applications of polyhedral computations in this area; give an overview of the different classes of polyhedra that may be adopted; outline the main polyhedral operations required by automatic analyzers and verifiers; and look at some possible combinations of polyhedra with other numerical abstractions that have the potential to improve the precision of the analysis. Areas where further theoretical investigations can result in important contributions are highlighted., 51 pages, 11 figures

Weakly-relational numeric constraints provide a compromise between complexity and expressivity that is adequate for several applications in the field of formal analysis and verification of software and hardware systems. We address the problems to be solved for the construction of full-fledged, efficient and provably correct abstract domains based on such constraints. We first propose to work with semantic abstract domains, whose elements are geometric shapes, instead of the (more concrete) syntactic abstract domains of constraint networks and matrices on which the previous proposals are based. This allows to solve, once and for all, the problem whereby closure by entailment, a crucial operation for the realization of such domains, seemed to impede the realization of proper widening operators. In our approach, the implementation of widenings relies on the availability of an effective reduction procedure for the considered constraint description: one for the domain of bounded difference shapes already exists in the literature; we provide algorithms for the significantly more complex cases of rational and integer octagonal shapes. We also improve upon the state-of-the-art by presenting, along with their proof of correctness, closure by entailment algorithms of reduced complexity for domains based on rational and integer octagonal constraints. The consequences of implementing weakly-relational numerical domains with floating point numbers are also discussed.

Since its inception as a student project in 2001, initially just for the handling (as the name implies) of convex polyhedra, the Parma Polyhedra Library has been continuously improved and extended by joining scrupulous research on the theoretical foundations of (possibly non-convex) numerical abstractions to a total adherence to the best available practices in software development. Even though it is still not fully mature and functionally complete, the Parma Polyhedra Library already offers a combination of functionality, reliability, usability and performance that is not matched by similar, freely available libraries. In this paper, we present the main features of the current version of the library, emphasizing those that distinguish it from other similar libraries and those that are important for applications in the field of analysis and verification of hardware and software systems., Comment: 38 pages, 2 figures, 3 listings, 3 tables

The finite powerset construction upgrades an abstract domain by allowing for the representation of finite disjunctions of its elements. While most of the operations on the finite powerset abstract domain are easily obtained by “lifting” the corresponding operations on the base-level domain, the problem of endowing finite powersets with a provably correct widening operator is still open. In this paper we define three generic widening methodologies for the finite powerset abstract domain. The widenings are obtained by lifting any widening operator defined on the base-level abstract domain and are parametric with respect to the specification of a few additional operators that allow all the flexibility required to tune the complexity/precision trade-off. As far as we know, this is the first time that the problem of deriving non-trivial, provably correct widening operators in a domain refinement is tackled successfully. We illustrate the proposed techniques by instantiating our widening methodologies on powersets of convex polyhedra, a domain for which no non-trivial widening operator was previously known.

Since the seminal work of Cousot and Halbwachs, the domain of convex polyhedra has been employed in several systems for the analysis and verification of hardware and software components. Although most implementations of the polyhedral operations assume that the polyhedra are topologically closed (i.e., all the constraints defining them are non-strict), several analyzers and verifiers need to compute on a domain of convex polyhedra that are not necessarily closed (NNC). The usual approach to implementing NNC polyhedra is to embed them into closed polyhedra in a higher dimensional vector space and reuse the tools and techniques already available for closed polyhedra. In this work we highlight and discuss the issues underlying such an embedding for those implementations that are based on the double description method, where a polyhedron may be described by a system of linear constraints or by a system of generating rays and points. Two major achievements are the definition of a theoretically clean, high-level user interface and the specification of an efficient procedure for removing redundancies from the descriptions of NNC polyhedra.