Scaling Client-Specific Equivalence Checking via Impact Boundary Search

Abstract

Client-specific equivalence checking (CSEC) is a technique proposed previously to perform impact analysis of changes to downstream components (libraries) from the perspective of an unchanged system (client). Existing analysis techniques, whether general (regression verification, equivalence checking) or special-purpose, when applied to CSEC, either require users to provide specifications, or do not scale. We propose a novel solution to the CSEC problem, called 2clever, that is based on searching the control-flow of a program for impact boundaries. We evaluate a prototype implementation of 2clever on a comprehensive set of benchmarks and conclude that our prototype performs well compared to the state-of-the-art.