MCDASH: Refinement-Based Property Verification for Machine Code
Akash Lal, Junghee Lim, and Thomas Reps
This paper presents MCDASH, a refinement-based model checker for
machine code. While model checkers such as SLAM, BLAST, and DASH have
each made significant contributions in the field of
verification/flaw-detection, their use has been restricted to programs
for which source code is available. This paper discusses several
challenges that arise when working with machine code, and explains how
they are addressed in MCDASH. Unlike previous model checkers, MCDASH
does not require the usual preprocessing steps of (a) building
control-flow graphs, and (b) performing points-to analysis (or alias
analysis); nor does MCDASH require type information to be supplied.
The paper also describes how we extended MCDASH to check properties of
self-modifying code.
MCDASH is built using language-independent meta-tools that generate
the implementations of the required analysis components from
descriptions of an instruction set's syntax and semantics. It has
been instantiated for Intel x86 and PowerPC.
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University of Wisconsin