Parameterized model counting for string and numeric constraints

Abdulbaki Aydin, William Eiers, Lucas Bang, Tegan Brennan, Miroslav Gavrilov, Tevfik Bultan, Fang Yu

2018 · 32 citations · 24 references

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Concepts

TL;DR

Symbolic program analysis has recently been extended to quantitative analyses via model counting constraint solvers, which compute the number of solutions to a constraint within a bound. The authors present a parameterized model counting constraint solver for string and numeric constraints. The solver constructs a multi‑track deterministic finite‑state automaton that accepts all solutions to the given constraint, over‑approximates non‑regular string constraints, and counts accepting paths, with no finite‑domain assumption so it can handle arbitrarily large bounds. Experimental results on a large set of constraints extracted from software show that the tool is as efficient or more precise than five existing solvers and uniquely handles mixed string‑integer constraints that others cannot.

Abstract

Recently, symbolic program analysis techniques have been extended to quantitative analyses using model counting constraint solvers. Given a constraint and a bound, a model counting constraint solver computes the number of solutions for the constraint within the bound. We present a parameterized model counting constraint solver for string and numeric constraints. We first construct a multi-track deterministic finite state automaton that accepts all solutions to the given constraint. We limit the numeric constraints to linear integer arithmetic, and for non-regular string constraints we over-approximate the solution set. Counting the number of accepting paths in the generated automaton solves the model counting problem. Our approach is parameterized in the sense that, we do not assume a finite domain size during automata construction, resulting in a potentially infinite set of solutions, and our model counting approach works for arbitrarily large bounds. We experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on a large set of string and numeric constraints extracted from software applications. We experimentally compare our tool to five existing model counting constraint solvers for string and numeric constraints and demonstrate that our tool is as efficient and as or more precise than other solvers. Moreover, our tool can handle mixed constraints with string and integer variables that no other tool can.

References

24