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Benjamin Schwarz
UC Berkeley
USA
Hao Chen
UC Davis
USA
David Wagner
UC Berkeley
USA
Geoff Morrison
UC Berkeley
USA
Jacob West
UC Berkeley
USA
Software model checking has become a popular tool for verifying programs' behavior. Recent results suggest that it is viable for finding and eradicating security bugs quickly. However, even state-of-the-art model checkers are limited in use when they report an overwhelming number of false positives, or when their lengthy running time dwarfs other software development processes. In this paper we report our experiences with software model checking for security properties on an extremely large scale---an entire Linux distribution consisting of 839 packages and 60 million lines of code. To date, we have discovered 108 exploitable bugs. Our results indicate that model checking can be both a feasible and integral part of the software development process.
Keywords: software security, model checking, static analysis