Unsound CLI options for various tools

Context

In #6480, there has been some extensive conversation about what it means for certain options to produce unsound behavior.

We concluded that unsound in this context is a proxy for the following two behaviors that we want to avoid:

A spurious counter example to an assertion, which means that the tool may report a coverage property (or a line of code) as reachable when in fact it is not, and
Wrong proof to an assertion, which means that it might indicate an assertion passing when it’s not.

We expect that, by default, CBMC and JBMC display none of the behavior we described above (and if they do, it’s an extremely serious bug that we aim to fix on an ASAP basis), but be aware that certain tools, like goto-instrument, may contain components that are experimental in nature and thus do transformations that eventually lead to behavior such as the ones described above. Furthermore, some options lead to unsound analysis results by design, and some transformations performed by goto-instrument will yield verification results that are (by design) unsound when taking verification of the non-transformed program as reference.

Examples of Options that may yield Unsound Results

The following options will produce a warning when used with CBMC or JBMC:

Use of --unwind or --unwindset without --unwinding-assertions, or the use of --partial-loops.
Depth or complexity-limited analysis (--depth, --symex-complexity-limit).

See Understanding Loop Unwinding for an elaboration of these options.

For arrays with unknown length (e.g. input arrays), JBMC has a default limit that can be changed with the option --max-nondet-array-length.

Experimental Options

Be advised that the following command line options to cbmc and goto-instrument have been reported to be unsound:

--full-slice has been reported to be unsound in issue cbmc#260 In particular, --full-slice appears to lead to spurious counter examples, because values that get assigned by a function whose body gets sliced out are no longer present in the trace, but still result in flipped verification results.

cbmc and goto-instrument have also been modified to warn that options used are unsound as part of their output. An example of how that output looks is shown below:

$ cbmc --full-slice ~/Devel/cbmc_bugs/6394/before-slice.out
CBMC version 5.45.0 (cbmc-5.43.0-77-g99c5a92de1-dirty) 64-bit arm64 macos
Reading GOTO program from file
Reading: ~/Devel/cbmc_bugs/6394/before-slice.out
Generating GOTO Program
Adding CPROVER library (x86_64)
Removal of function pointers and virtual functions
Generic Property Instrumentation
**** WARNING: Experimental option --full-slice, analysis results may be unsound. See https://github.com/diffblue/cbmc/issues/260
Performing a full slice
Running with 8 object bits, 56 offset bits (default)
Starting Bounded Model Checking
[...]

Last modified: 2024-12-16 13:58:47 -0800