Pushdown Model Checking for Security

David A. Wagner

Abstract: One of the key challenges for computer security is the problem of software security: how to build software that is free of implementation vulnerabilities. In this talk, I will present experience with pushdown model checking for software security. First, I will survey simple methods for pushdown model checking, and I will introduce MOPS, a tool for pushdown model checking of C programs. Then, I will show many security properties of interest may be encoded as temporal safety properties that are well-suited to analysis with model checking. I will report on our experience applying MOPS to tens of millions of lines of C code. Finally, I will discuss some possible directions for future research.