Model Checking Recursive Programs with Exact Predicate Abstraction

We propose an approach for analyzing non-termination and reachability properties of recursive programs using a combination of over- and under-approximating abstractions. First, we define a new concrete program semantics, mixed, that combines both natural and operational semantics, and use it to design an on-the-fly symbolic algorithm. Second, we combine this algorithm with abstraction by following classical fixpoint abstraction techniques. This makes our approach parametrized by different approximating semantics of predicate abstraction and enables a uniform solution for over- and under-approximating semantics. The algorithm is implemented in Yasm , and we show that it can establish non-termination of non-trivial C programs completely automatically.