Gamifying Program Analysis

Daniel Fava, Julien Signoles, Matthieu Lemerre, Martin Schäf, Ashish Tiwari

Abstract: interpretation is a powerful tool in program verification. Several commercial or industrial scale implementations of abstract interpretation have demonstrated that this approach can verify safety properties of real-world code. However, using abstract interpretation tools is not always simple. If no user-provided hints are available, the abstract interpretation engine may lose precision during widening and produce an overwhelming number of false alarms. However, manually providing these hints is time consuming and often frustrating when re-running the analysis takes a lot of time.