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ANTLR-Based C-Frontend for Verification

This subproject adds an ANTLR-grammar based C-Frontend to Theta. This is independent of any formalism, and aims to be as widely applicable as possible.

Features

This frontend can handle preprocessed .c or .i file with the following features:

  • Basic C support: global declarations (functions and variables), function definitions, loops, various data types, global typedefs, etc.
  • Integer- and bitvector-arithmetic support based on required features (e.g. for floats or bitwise operators bitvector precision is necessary)
  • Basic struct and array support
  • Basic (and experimental) flat-memory based pointer handling
  • ILP32 and LP64 type system support (with possible extensibility)

Limitations, known bugs

A number of features are either not well tested or in certain aspects buggy. Error handling is done on a best-effort level as the C specification is way too complex to handle entirely correctly. In most cases an error, or a warning message is displayed, but in some unexpected situations a silent failure is also possible.

In particular, the following features are either not implemented or can produce buggy models:

  • Floating-point pointers (produces an exception when (de)referred)
  • Structs including arrays and arrays including structs (produces an exception when accessed)
  • Enums (only produces a warning, behaves as a normal signed int would)
  • Unions (produces an exception when any element is accessed)
  • Alignof, Sizeof, various extensions (produces a parsing exception)
  • Pointer arithmetic (produces an exception)
  • Using a non-specific subtype of char (produces a warning) - use (un)signed char instead
  • Includes and other preprocessor directives (produces an exception or fails silently!)
  • Arrays are not pointers and pointers cannot be used as arrays (produces an exception)
  • Memory access is not checked, and therefore it is easy to receive a faulty value by over-indexing an array (fails silently!)
  • Array elements are not range-checked and therefore false positives are possible (consider char c[2]; if(c[1] > 500) reach_error())

Note that only program elements that are (transitively) reachable from main() are checked against any violation of the above criteria, i.e. a program containing unsupported elements that are not utilized is handled correctly. This is necessary for handling most preprocessed (.i) files, as the standard library includes a lot of complex and unsupported code.

High-Level Process

The workflow to get a formal model from a C file is the following:

  1. Preprocess the C file
  2. Parse and transform the C file using this subproject
  3. Using the IM, build a formal model using a specialized visitor

Structure of the IM

The IM is an interlinked model of the following elements:

  • CAssignment: variable assignment
  • CAssume: an assumption over the range of a variable
  • CBreak: the break C instruction
  • CCall: function call to a C-type function
  • CCase: a branch (case) of a switch-case statement
  • CCompound: a compound statement (0..* statements inside braces)
  • CContinue: the continue C instruction
  • CDecls: variable declarations
  • CDefault: the default branch of a switch-case statement
  • CDoWhile: a do-while loop statement
  • CExpr: a C expression
  • CFor: a for loop statement
  • CFunction: a function in the source
  • CGoto: goto statement
  • CIf: a conditional branching statement
  • CInitializerList: initializer list for arrays, structs and other complex structures
  • CProgram: the root element
  • CRet: return statement from a function
  • CSwitch: a switch-case statement
  • CWhile: a while loop statement

To map these statements to elements of a formal model, the hu.bme.mit.theta.frontend.transformation.model.statements.CStatementVisitorBase class can be used through inheritance. An example can be found in hu.bme.mit.theta.xcfa.model.utils.FrontendXcfaBuilder.