(kindly reviewed by T. Antignac, D. Bühler and F. Kirchner)

Among Frama-C 16 Sulfur's new features, one of them is dedicated to help setting up and iterating case studies. In this series of posts, we will explain how to use such scripts to save time when starting a new case study with EVA.

This series supposes some familiarity with EVA, as in, its basic usage is not detailed. Reading A simple EVA tutorial or the tutorial in the EVA user manual should be sufficient.

In this first part, we will explore the basics of the analysis-scripts framework and its use on an open source project. We will see how to get the preprocessor flags needed to prepare an analysis template. This template is in fact a Makefile which will be used to set up the analysis. It will enable us to define the sources to parse by editing its targets.

In the next post, we will see that, once the set-up is done, the analysis steps are similar to the ones presented in previous EVA tutorials: run a simple analysis, then refine, improve the precision, iterate. Once an analysis has been run, we will see how to track red alarms to improve the coverage. This will lead to some syntactic fixes that will allow the analysis to go further.

Analysis scripts

The release 16 (Sulfur) of Frama-C includes a small set of files, called analysis scripts, whose purpose is to help starting new analyses with Frama-C. It is currently focused on analyses with EVA, but other plug-ins such as WP and E-ACSL may incorporate it as well.

The new files are available in the analysis-scripts of Frama-C's share directory. Use frama-c -print-share-path to obtain its exact location. This directory currently contains a README, two small Bash scripts and a Makefile (frama-c.mk) which contains the bulk of it.

Note: the README.md mentions fcscripts, the old name of this set of files (it was already being used by the open-source-case-studies Git repository, under that name, but now it is part of the Frama-C release). The upcoming Frama-C release will update that.

analysis-scripts relies on some GNU-specific, Make 4.0+ features. This version of Make (or a more recent one) is already available on most Linux distributions and on Homebrew for MacOS, but in the worst case, downloading and compiling GNU Make from source should be an option.

Basically, what these files provide is a set of semi-generated Makefile targets and rules that automate most of the steps typically used by Frama-C/EVA developers to set up a new case study. The scripts themselves are extensively used in the open-source-case-studies repository, which serves as use example.

Using analysis scripts

To illustrate the use of analysis-scripts, we picked one project from ffaraz's awesome-cpp repository: GHamrouni's Recommender, a library from the Machine Learning section.

We start by cloning the repository¹:

git clone git@github.com:GHamrouni/Recommender.git

¹ Note: at the time of this posting, the latest commit is 649fbfc. The results presented later in this tutorial may differ in the future. You can select this commit via git checkout 649fbfc in case this happens.

Then, inside the newly-created Recommender directory, we look for its build instructions. Many C open-source libraries and tools are based on autoconf/configure/make, which may require running some commands before all headers are available (e.g., ./configure often produces a config.h file from a config.h.in template). Frama-C does not require compiling the sources, so in most cases you can stop before running make. However, since Frama-C does require preprocessor flags, you can use existing Makefiles to cheaply obtain that information.

Obtaining preprocessor flags from a compile_commands.json

In order to find out which preprocessor flags are needed for a given program, you can use tools such as CMake or Build EAR to produce a JSON compilation database, commonly called compile_commands.json. This is a JSON file which contains the list of commands (including all of their arguments) to be given to the compiler. It contains many options which are irrelevant to Frama-C (such as warning and optimization flags, typically -W and -O), but it also contains preprocessor flags, mostly -I and -D, which we are interested in.

The compile_commands.json file can be produced as follows:

1. If the project is based on CMake, add -DCMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS=ON to the cmake command-line, e.g. instead of cmake <source dir>, use cmake <source dir> -DCMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS=ON.

2. If the project is based on Makefile, use Build EAR. After Build EAR is installed, you just have to prefix make with bear: typing bear make is usually enough to obtain the JSON database.

Note: Frama-C 17 (Chlorine) includes option -json-compilation-database, which allows using compile_commands.json directly, rendering the next step unnecessary.

Once you have the file, simply grep it for -I and -D flags, e.g:

grep '\-I\|\-D' compile_commands.json

Those flags should be added to the preprocessor flags in Frama-C's Makefile (described in the next section), CPPFLAGS.

Note that these recommendations may not work in complex setups. Manual inspection of the commands used during compilation might be necessary to obtain all necessary flags.

Preparing an analysis template

We will create a Makefile for Frama-C, to manage dependencies and help re-run analyses. In order to avoid having to type make -f <name> each time, we will name it GNUmakefile, for the following reasons:

1. GNU Make gives preference to GNUmakefile over Makefile if both exist, so the default file used when typing make will be ours, even if the project already has its own Makefile;

2. This avoids having to rename/overwrite existing makefiles (or, worse, having Frama-C's Makefile erased when re-running ./configure);

3. The analysis-scripts Makefile already relies on some features specific to GNU Make, so there is no compatibility downside here.

If you want to name your Makefile otherwise, just remember to always add -f <your makefile name> to the make commands presented in this tutorial.

Our GNUmakefile will be created with content based on the template available on Frama-C's Github repository.

In this tutorial, we consider that Frama-C is installed and in the PATH to keep the template concise.

include $(shell frama-c-config -print-share-path)/analysis-scripts/frama-c.mk

# Global parameters
CPPFLAGS     =
FCFLAGS     +=
EVAFLAGS    +=

export FRAMA_C_MEMORY_FOOTPRINT = 8

# Default targets
all: main.eva

# Input files
main.parse: <TO BE COMPLETED>

The essential element to complete this template is the list of files to be parsed. Other arguments, such as flags for the C preprocessor (CPPFLAGS), for the Frama-C kernel (FCFLAGS) and for the EVA plug-in (EVAFLAGS) are also to be filled by the user, when necessary.

Finally, note that the target name (main) is completely arbitrary. You can have multiple targets if your code contains multiple main functions. The important part is the use of the suffixes .parse and .eva, which are hard-coded in the analysis-scripts' Makefile to generate targets with the appropriate dependencies and rules.

The .parse suffix is used by analysis-scripts to set the list of source files to be parsed. It is associated to an .eva target which runs the EVA analysis. This target is generated by analysis-scripts itself; we just need to tell the Makefile that it should be run when we run make all, or simply make, since all is the first rule in our Makefile.

Setting sources and testing parsing

The list of source files to be given to Frama-C can be obtained from the compile_commands.json file. However, it is often the case that the software under analysis contains several binaries, each requiring a different set of sources. The JSON compilation database does not map the sources used to produce each binary, so it is not always possible to entirely automate the process. You may have to manually adjust the sets of files to be given to Frama-C. For a whole-program analysis with EVA, in particular, you might want to ensure that there is exactly one file defining a main function.

In the case of Recommender, since it is a library, the src directory does not contain a main function. However, the test directory contains two files, each of them defining a main function. In this tutorial, we will use the test.c file as the main entry point of the analysis. We could also have used the -lib-entry option on one or more functions in the library. More advanced users of Frama-C may prefer this option though we will keep it simple and use the main function in test.c as unique entry point in this tutorial.

Therefore, the list of sources to be filled in the main.parse target is the following:

main.parse: src/*.c test/test.c

We can test that Frama-C is able to parse the sources:

make main.parse

If you are strictly following this tutorial, you should have the following error:

[kernel] Parsing test/test.c (with preprocessing)
test/test.c:1:25: fatal error: recommender.h: No such file or directory
 #include "recommender.h"
                         ^
compilation terminated.

This is because we never included the actual -I lines that we found in the compile_commands.json file. Note that they include flag -I../../src/, which is relative to one of the subdirectories in tools/*. Since our Makefile (and thus Frama-C) will run relative to the base directory in Recommender, the actual include directive needs to be -Isrc, which we add to CPPFLAGS:

CPPFLAGS= -Isrc

Running make main.parse now should succeed. Run it again. You will notice that nothing is done: thanks to the dependencies managed by analysis-scripts, unless you modify one of the source files, or the flags given to Frama-C (CPPFLAGS or FCFLAGS), Frama-C will not waste time reparsing the results: they have already been saved inside the main.parse directory.

Contents of the .parse directory

For each .parse target, analysis-scripts will create a corresponding directory with several files:

• command: the command-line arguments used by Frama-C;

• framac.ast: the pretty-printed normalized AST produced by Frama-C;

• stats.txt: performance information (user time and memory consumption);

• warnings.log: warnings emitted during parsing;

• framac.sav: a Frama-C save file (a binary) with the result of parsing;

• parse.log: the entire log of the parsing (includes the warnings in warnings.log).

All of these files are used internally by the analysis scripts or some other tools (notably for regression testing and profiling purposes), however only the last 2 files are occasionally relevant for the end user:

• framac.sav can be used with frama-c -load, for instance when trying different plug-ins;

• parse.log contains a copy of all messages emitted during parsing.

If we want to load the parsed files in the Frama-C GUI, we can use either frama-c -load framac.sav, or more conveniently, make main.parse.gui. The advantage of the latter is that it will generate the .parse directory if it has not been done already.

This concludes the first part of this tutorial. In the next post, we will run EVA using our Makefile, then iterate to improve the analysis.

On the previous post we've seen how to run EVA, but at the end we had a NON TERMINATING FUNCTION for a function that is supposed to always terminate, a likely indication that a definitive undefined behavior has been found in the analysis. In this post, we will see how to diagnose such cases, using derived plug-ins and the GUI.

We will reuse the save file produced at the end of the analysis, value2.sav.

When the GUI is not enough

Usually, after running the value analysis in the command-line, we launch the GUI to visualize the results:

frama-c-gui -load value2.sav

In this case, because of the NON TERMINATING FUNCTION message, we know that at some point in the program we will have red statements in the GUI, which indicate unreachable code.

By scrolling down from the main function, we reach the non-terminating statement, which is a call to test_x25519:

Note the red semicolon at the end of the statement, and the fact that the following statements are also red. If we click on the statement, the Information panel says that This call never terminates.

You can right-click on the function and Go to the definition of test_x25519, and you will find the same thing inside, this time a call to crypto_x25519_public_key, and so on, until you reach fe_tobytes, which is slightly different: it contains a for loop (defined via a macro FOR), after which all statements are red, but the loop itself is not an infinite loop: it simply iterates i from 0 to 5. How can this be non-terminating?

The answer, albeit non-intuitive, is simple: there is one statement inside the loop which is non-terminating, but not during the first iteration of the loop. Because the GUI colors are related to the consolidated result of all callstacks (i.e., if there is at least one path which reaches a statement, it is marked as reachable), it cannot show precisely which callstack led to the non-termination. To better understand what happens here, we will use the Nonterm plug-in.

Nonterm to the rescue

Nonterm is a small plug-in that uses the result of the value analysis to display callstack-wise information about non-terminating statements, by emitting warnings when such statements are found. It requires EVA to have been executed previously, but it runs very quickly itself, so you do not need to save its results. Close the GUI and re-run it again, this time with Nonterm:

frama-c-gui -load value2.sav -then -nonterm -nonterm-ignore exit

The -nonterm-ignore exit argument serves to minimize the number of warnings related to calls to the libc exit() function, which is always non-terminating.

The warnings generated by Nonterm are displayed in the Messages panel, after those emitted by EVA.

The warnings display the non-terminating callstacks. The order of the warnings themselves is not relevant. However, some kinds of warnings are more useful than others. Here is a rough indication of their relevance, from most to least precise:

1. Non-terminating statements;
2. Non-terminating loops;
3. Non-terminating function calls;
4. Unreachable returns.

In our analysis, the first (and only) warning about a non-terminating statement is the following:

Note a few important details about the Frama-C GUI:

• When you click on the warning in the Messages panel, the GUI focuses on the related statement.
• When a statement has associated annotations (here, two warnings), the focus is placed on the first annotation, instead of the statement itself. This does not imply that the annotation itself is related to this specific warning.
• The property status indicators (colored circles, or bullets on the left of each property) display the consolidated status of all callstacks; in particular, if the property is definitively valid in one callstack, but possibly/definitively invalid in another, the GUI displays a yellow bullet.

Nonterm restores some of the information lost due to callstack consolidation. The highlighted warning in particular gives us the following information:

1. There exists a stack trace in which statement h5 -= c5 << 25 does not terminate;
2. There is exactly one stack trace in which the statement never terminates; all other stack traces (which are not shown in the warning) terminate.

Currently, it is not possible to select a stack trace from the Messages panel, but we can do so using the Values panel. If we switch to it (keeping the statement highlighted in the source code), we can see that there are 40 different stack traces reaching this point.

Values Panel

The Values panel is arguably the most powerful inspection tool for the EVA plug-in in the Frama-C GUI. Some of its features were presented in earlier posts, but for the sake of completeness, here are some commented screenshots:

The values displayed in this panel are related to the green highlighted zone in the Cil source.

The Ctrl+E shortcut is equivalent to highlighting a statement, then right-clicking Evaluate ACSL term. The Ctrl+Shift+E shortcut is slightly more powerful: it also evaluates terms, such as \valid(p). This command is not available from any menus.

The Multiple selections checkbox allows adding several expressions to be compared side-by-side. When checked, highlighting an expression in the same statement adds a column with its value. Note that highlighting a different statement results in resetting all columns.

The three checkboxes to the right are seldom used: Expand rows simply expands all callstacks (but generates visual clutter); Consolidated value displays the row all (union of all callstacks); and Per callstack displays a row for each separate callstack.

The callstacks display has several contextual menus that can be accessed via right-clicks.

Let us start from the bottom: right-clicking on a callstack shows a popup menu that allows you to focus on a given callstack. This focus modifies the display in the Cil code viewer: reachability will only be displayed for the focused callstack(s). We will come back to that later.

Right-clicking on a cell containing a value allows filtering on all callstacks for which the expression has the same value. This is often used, for instance, to focus on all callstacks in which a predicate evaluates to invalid or unknown.

Finally, clicking on the column headers allows filtering columns.

Note that the Callstacks column header displays a pipette icon when a filter is being applied, to remind you that other callstacks exist.

Filtering non-terminating callstacks

In our code, despite the existence of 40 callstacks, only one of them is non-terminating. If you highlight the 0 ≤ c5 expression before statement h5 -= c5 << 25, you will see that only a single callstack displays invalid in the column 0 ≤ c5. Focus on this callstack using the popup menu, then highlight expression c5 in the Cil code. You will obtain the following:

As you can see, the GUI now displays the statements following h5 -= c5 << 25 in red, indicating thay they are unreachable in the currently focused callstacks. The exact value that caused this is shown in column c5: -1. The C standard considers the left-shift of a negative number as undefined behavior. Because -1 is the only possible value in this callstack, the reduction caused by the alarm leads to a post-state that is <BOTTOM>.

Proceeding with the analysis

To allow EVA to continue the analysis of the code, we need to modify it in some way. Since we are not experts in cryptography, we are unable to provide a definitive explanation why the code was written this way. In any case, it is not specific to Monocypher, but also present in TweetNaCl and ref10, two cryptographic libraries.

It is likely that replacing the signed carry variables in function fe_mul with unsigned ones would get rid of the undefined behavior, without changing the expected behavior of the code. However, without a more formal analysis performed by a cryptographer, this is just guesswork. Still, we need to do something to be able to continue the analysis (and possibly spot more undefined behaviors), such as changing the declarations of variables c0 to c9 to u64 instead of i64. Then, re-parse the sources, re-run the analysis, and keep iterating.

Ideas for complex situations

In the beta version of this post, we were using version 0.1 of Monocypher, which had a different version of functions related to fe_mul. In particular, some of the functions were taken from TweetNaCl, and the code was not unrolled the same way as in Monocypher 0.3. One of the consequences was that Nonterm was unable to show as clear a picture as in this case; it was necessary to perform syntactic loop unrolling (e.g., using loop pragma UNROLL) just to be able to clearly see in the GUI which statement was non-terminating.

Future developments in Frama-C and in the EVA plug-in will help identifying and visualizing such situations more easily.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank loup-vaillant (Monocypher's author) for the discussions concerning Monocypher and EVA's analysis. New versions of Monocypher have been released since the analysis performed for this series of posts, which do not present the undefined behavior described in this post.

(with the collaboration of T. Antignac, Q. Bouillaguet, F. Kirchner and B. Yakobowski)

This is the first of a series of posts on a new EVA tutorial primarily aimed at beginners (some of the later posts contain more advanced content).

Reminder: EVA is the new name of the Value analysis plug-in.

There is a Value tutorial on Skein-256 that is part of the Value Analysis user manual. The present tutorial is complementary and presents some new techniques available in Frama-C. If you intend to use EVA, we recommend you read the Skein-256 tutorial as well because it details several things that will not be repeated here. (However, it is not required to have read the Skein-256 before this one.)

The source code used in this tutorial is the version 0.3 of Monocypher, a C99-conformant cryptographic library that also includes a nice test suite.

Note: newer versions of Monocypher are available! For this tutorial, please ensure you download version 0.3, otherwise you will not obtain the same behavior as described in this tutorial.

Future posts will include more advanced details, useful for non-beginners as well, so stay tuned!

Starting with Frama-C/EVA

This tutorial will use Monocypher's code, but it should help you to figure out how to analyze your code as well. First and foremost, it should help you answer these questions:

1. Is my code suitable for a first analysis with Frama-C/EVA?
2. How should I proceed?

(Un)Suitable code

There are lots of C code in the wild; for instance, searching Github for language:C results in more than 250k projects. However, many of them are not suitable candidates for a beginner, for reasons that will be detailed in the following.

Note that you can analyze several kinds of codes with Frama-C/EVA. However, without previous experience, some of them will raise many issues at the same time, which can be frustrating and inefficient.

Here is a list of kinds of code that a Frama-C/EVA beginner should avoid:

1. Libraries without tests

   EVA is based on a whole-program analysis. It considers executions starting from a given entry point. Libraries without tests contain a multitude of entry points and no initial context for the analysis. Therefore, before analyzing them, you will have to write your own contexts¹ or test cases.

2. Command-line tools that rely heavily on the command-line (e.g. using getopt), without test cases.

   Similar to the previous situation: a program that receives all of its input from the command-line behaves like a library. Command-line parsers and tools with complex string manipulation are not the best use cases for the EVA's current implementation. A fuzzer might be a better tool in this case (though a fuzzer will only find bugs, not ensure their absence). Again, you will have to provide contexts¹ or test cases.

3. Code with lots of non-C99 code (e.g. assembly, compiler extensions)

   Frama-C is based on the C standard, and while it includes numerous extensions to handle GCC and MSVC-specific code, it is a primarily semantic-based tool. Inline assembly is supported syntactically, but its semantics needs to be given via ACSL annotations. Exotic compiler extensions are not always supported. For instance, trying to handle the Linux kernel without previous Frama-C experience is a daunting task.

4. Code relying heavily on libraries (including the C standard library)

   Frama-C ships with an annotated standard library, which has ACSL specifications for many commonly-used functions (e.g. string.h and stdlib.h). This library is however incomplete and in some cases imprecise². You will end up having to specify and refine several functions.

¹ A context, here, is similar to a test case, but more general. It can contain, for instance, generalized variables (e.g. by using Frama_C_interval or ACSL specifications).

² A balance is needed between conciseness (high-level view), expressivity, and precision (implementation-level details). The standard library shipped with Frama-C tries to be as generic as possible, but for specific case studies, specialized specifications can provide better results.

Each new version of Frama-C brings improvements concerning these aspects, but we currently recommend you try a more suitable code base at first. If your objective is to tackle such a challenging code base, contact us! Together we can handle such challenges more efficiently.

This explains why Monocypher is a good choice: it has test cases, it is self-contained (little usage of libc functions), and it is C99-conforming.

The 3-step method

In a nutshell, the tutorial consists in performing three steps:

1. Parsing the code (adding stubs if necessary);
2. Running EVA with mostly default parameters (for a first, approximated result);
3. Tuning EVA and running it again.

The initial parsing is explained in this post, while the other steps will be detailed in future posts.

General recommendations

Before starting the use of Frama-C, we have some important general recommendations concerning the EVA plug-in:

1. DO NOT start with the GUI. Use the command-line. You should consider Frama-C/EVA as a command-line tool with a viewer (the GUI). The Frama-C GUI is not an IDE (e.g. you cannot edit code with it), and EVA does not use the GUI for anything else other than rendering its results.

2. Use scripts. Even a simple shell script, just to save the command-line options, is already enough for a start. For larger code bases, you will want Makefiles or other build tools to save time.

3. Use frama-c -kernel-help (roughly equivalent to the Frama-C manpage) and frama-c -value-help to obtain information about the command-line options. Each option contains a brief description of what it does, so grepping the output for keywords (frama-c -kernel-help | grep debug for instance) is often useful. Otherwise, consider Stack Overflow - there is a growing base of questions and answers available there.

4. Advance one step at a time. As you will see, the very first step is to parse the code, and nothing else. One does not simply run EVA, unless he or she is very lucky (or the program is very simple). Such precautions may seem excessive at first, but being methodical will save you time in the long run.

Parsing the code

Often overlooked, this step is erroneously considered as "too simple" ("just give all files to the command-line!"). In a few cases, it is indeed possible to run frama-c *.c -val and succeed in parsing everything and running EVA.

When this does not work, however, it is useful to isolate the steps to identify the error. Here are some general recommendations:

1. Start with few files, and include more when needed

   Note that parsing may succeed even if some functions are only declared, but not defined. This will of course prevent EVA from analyzing them. If so, you may have to return to this step later, adding more files to be parsed.

2. Ensure that preprocessor definitions and inclusions are correct

   Several code bases require the use of preprocessor definitions (-D in GCC) or directory inclusions (-I in GCC) in order for the code to be correctly preprocessed. Such information is often available in Makefiles, and can be given to Frama-C using e.g. -cpp-extra-args="-DFOO=bar -Iheaders".

   -cpp-extra-args is the most useful option concerning this step. It is used in almost every case study, and often the only required option for parsing. Note: old releases of Frama-C did not have this option, and -cpp-command was recommended instead. Nowadays, -cpp-command is rarely needed and should be avoided, because it is slightly more complex to use.

3. Make stubs for missing standard library definitions

   Frama-C's standard library is incomplete, especially for system-dependent definitions that are not in C99 or in POSIX. Missing constants, for instance, may require the inclusion of stub files (e.g. stubs.h) with the definitions and/or the ACSL specifications. A common way to include such files is to use GCC's -include option, documented here.

4. Save the result

   Use Frama-C's -save/-load options to avoid having to reparse the files each time. There is no default extension associated with Frama-C save files, although .sav is a common choice. For instance, running:

   frama-c <parse options> -save parsed.sav
   

   will try to parse the program and, if it succeeds, will save the Frama-C session to parsed.sav. You can then open it in the GUI (frama-c-gui -load parse.sav), to see what the normalized source code looks like, or use it as an input for the next step.

Reminder: for the EVA plug-in, the GUI is not recommended for parametrizing/tuning an analysis. It is best used as a viewer for the results.

The default output of EVA is rather verbose but very useful for studying small programs. For realistic case studies, however, you may want to consider the following options:

• -no-val-show-progress: does not print when entering a new function. This will be the default in Frama-C 15 (Phosphorus);

• -value-msg-key=-initial-state: does not print the initial state;

• -value-msg-key=-final-states: does not print the final states of the analysis.

Note the minus symbols (-) before initial-state and final-states. They indicate we want to hide the messages conditioned by these categories.

Parsing monocypher

As indicated above, the naive approach (frama-c *.c) does not work with monocypher:

$ frama-c *.c

[kernel] Parsing FRAMAC_SHARE/libc/__fc_builtin_for_normalization.i (no preprocessing)
[kernel] Parsing monocypher.c (with preprocessing)
[kernel] Parsing more_speed.c (with preprocessing)
[kernel] syntax error at more_speed.c:15:
         13
         14    // Specialised squaring function, faster than general multiplication.
         15    sv fe_sq(fe h, const fe f)
               ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
         16    {
         17        i32 f0 = f[0]; i32 f1 = f[1]; i32 f2 = f[2]; i32 f3 = f[3]; i32 f4 = f[4];

The first line is always printed when Frama-C parses a source file, and can be ignored.

The second line indicates that monocypher.c is being parsed.

The third line indicates that more_speed.c is now being parsed, implying that the parsing of monocypher.c ended without issues.

Finally, we have a parsing error in more_speed.c, line 15. That line, plus the lines above and below it, are printed in the console.

Indeed, the file more_speed.c is not a valid C source (sv is not a type defined in that file, and it does not include any other files). But this is not an actual issue, since more_speed.c is not part of the library itself, simply an extra file (this can be confirmed by looking into the makefile). Thus we are going to restrict the set of files Frama-C is asked to analyze.

Note: Frama-C requires the entire program to be parsed at once. It may be necessary to adapt compilation scripts to take that into account.

We also see that the rule for building monocypher.o includes a preprocessor definition, -DED25519_SHA512. We will add that to our parsing command, which will then become:

frama-c test.c sha512.c monocypher.c -cpp-extra-args="-DED25519_SHA512" -save parsed.sav

The lack of error messages is, in itself, a resounding success.

The first part of this tutorial ends here. See you next week!

For now, you can start reading the Skein-256 tutorial available at the beginning of the EVA manual. Otherwise, if you already know EVA (and still decided to read this), you may try to find some undefined behavior (UB) in Monocypher 0.3!

Hint: There is indeed some UB, although it does not impact the code in any meaningful way. At least not with today's compilers, maybe in the future... and anyway, it has been fixed in the newer releases of Monocypher.

To conclude our 3-part series on ACSL specifications for Value, we present a feature introduced in Frama-C Aluminium that allows more precise specifications: the indirect label in ACSL assigns clauses. The expressivity gains when writing \froms are especially useful for plugins such as Value.

Indirect assigns

Starting in Frama-C Aluminium (20150601), assigns clauses (e.g. assigns x \from src) accept the keyword indirect (e.g. assigns x \from indirect:src), stating that the dependency from src to x is indirect, that is, it does not include data dependencies between src and x. In other words, src itself will never be directly assigned to x.

Indirect dependencies are, most commonly, control dependencies, in which src affects x by controlling whether some instruction will modify the value of x. Another kind of indirect dependency are address dependencies, related to the computation of addresses for pointer variables.

Let us once again refer to our running example, the specification and mock implementation of safe_get_random_char. As a reminder, here's its specification, without the ensures \subset(*out,...) postcondition, as suggested in the previous post:

#include <stdlib.h>
typedef enum {OK, NULL_PTR, INVALID_LEN} status;

/*@
  assigns \result \from out, buf, n;
  assigns *out \from out, buf, buf[0 .. n-1], n;
  behavior null_ptr:
    assumes out == \null || buf == \null;
    assigns \result \from out, buf, n;
    ensures \result == NULL_PTR;
  behavior invalid_len:
    assumes out != \null && buf != \null;
    assumes n == 0;
    assigns \result \from out, buf, n;
    ensures \result == INVALID_LEN;
  behavior ok:
    assumes out != \null && buf != \null;
    assumes n > 0;
    requires \valid(out);
    requires \valid_read(&buf[0 .. n-1]);
    ensures \result == OK;
    ensures \initialized(out);
  complete behaviors;
  disjoint behaviors;
 */
status safe_get_random_char(char *out, char const *buf, unsigned n);

Here's the mock implementation of the original function, in which ensures \subset(*out,...) holds:

#include "__fc_builtin.h"
#include <stdlib.h>
typedef enum { OK, NULL_PTR, INVALID_LEN } status;

status safe_get_random_char(char *out, char const *buf, unsigned n) {
  if (out == NULL || buf == NULL) return NULL_PTR;
  if (n == 0) return INVALID_LEN;
  *out = buf[Frama_C_interval(0,n-1)];
  return OK;
}

And here's the main function used in our tests:

void main() {
  char *msg = "abc";
  int len_arr = 4;
  status res;
  char c;
  res = safe_get_random_char(&c, msg, len_arr);
  //@ assert res == OK;
  res = safe_get_random_char(&c, NULL, len_arr);
  //@ assert res == NULL_PTR;
  res = safe_get_random_char(NULL, msg, len_arr);
  //@ assert res == NULL_PTR;
  res = safe_get_random_char(&c, msg, 0);
  //@ assert res == INVALID_LEN;
}

In the mock implementation, we see that out and buf are tested to see if they are equal to NULL, but their value itself (i.e., the address they point to) is never actually assigned to *out; only the characters inside buf may be assigned to it. Therefore, out and buf are both control dependencies (in that, they control whether *out = buf[Frama_C_interval(0,n-1)] is executed), and thus indirect as per our definition.

n is also a control dependency of the assignment to *out, due to the check if (n == 0). n also appears in buf[Frama_C_interval(0,n-1)], leading this time to an address dependency: in lval = *(buf + Frama_C_interval(0,n-1)), lval depends indirectly on every variable used to compute the address that will be dereferenced (buf, n, and every variable used by Frama_C_interval in this case).

If we run Value using our specification, this is the result:

[value] ====== VALUES COMPUTED ======
[value] Values at end of function main:
  msg ∈ {{ "abc" }}
  len_arr ∈ {4}
  res ∈ {2}
  c ∈
   {{ garbled mix of &{c; "abc"}
    (origin: Arithmetic {file.c:33}) }}

Note that c has a garbled mix which includes c itself, plus the string literal "abc". The culprit is this assigns clause:

assigns *out \from out, buf, buf[0 .. n-1], n;

out is c and buf is "abc". n, despite also being a dependency, does not contribute to the garbled mix because it is a scalar. The garbled mix appears because, in some functions, it is the address of the pointer itself that is assigned to the lvalue in the assigns clause. Without a means of distinguishing between direct and indirect dependencies, one (dangerous) workaround is to omit some dependencies from the clauses. This may lead to incorrect results.

Thanks to indirect \from clauses, now we can avoid the garbled mix by specifying that out and buf are only indirect dependencies. Applying the same principle to all assigns clauses, we obtain the final version of our (fixed) specification:

/*@
  assigns \result \from indirect:out, indirect:buf, indirect:n;
  assigns *out \from indirect:out, indirect:buf, buf[0 .. n-1], indirect:n;
  behavior null_ptr:
    assumes out == \null || buf == \null;
    assigns \result \from indirect:out, indirect:buf, indirect:n;
    ensures \result == NULL_PTR;
  behavior invalid_len:
    assumes out != \null && buf != \null;
    assumes n == 0;
    assigns \result \from indirect:out, indirect:buf, indirect:n;
    ensures \result == INVALID_LEN;
  behavior ok:
    assumes out != \null && buf != \null;
    assumes n > 0;
    requires \valid(out);
    requires \valid_read(&buf[0 .. n-1]);
    ensures \result == OK;
    ensures \initialized(out);
  complete behaviors;
  disjoint behaviors;
 */
status safe_get_random_char(char *out, char const *buf, unsigned n);

Note that indirect dependencies are implied by direct ones, so they never need to be added twice.

With this specification, Value will return c ∈ [--..--], without garbled mix. The result is still imprecise due to the lack of ensures, but better than before. Especially when trying Value on a new code base (where most functions have no stubs, or only simple ones), the difference between garbled mix and [--..--] (often called top int, that is, the top value of the lattice of integer ranges) is significant.

In the new specification, it is arguably easier to read the dependencies and to reason about them: users can skip the indirect dependencies when reasoning about the propagation of imprecise pointer values.

The new specification is more verbose because indirect is not the default. And this is so in order to avoid changing the semantics of existing specifications, which might become unsound.

The From plugin has a new (experimental) option, --show-indirect-deps, which displays the computed dependencies using the new syntax. It is considered experimental simply because it has not yet been extensively used in industrial applications, but it should work fine. Do not hesitate to tell us if you have issues with it.

Ambiguously direct dependencies

It is not always entirely obvious whether a given dependency can be safely considered as indirect, or if it should be defined as direct. This is often the case when a function has an output argument that is related to the length (or size, cardinality, etc.) of one of its inputs. strnlen(s, n) is an example of a libc function with that property: it returns n itself when s is longer than n characters.

Let us consider the following function, which searches for a character in an array and returns its offset, or the given length if not found:

// returns the index of c in buf[0 .. n-1], or n if not found
/*@ assigns \result \from indirect:c, indirect:buf,
                          indirect:buf[0 .. n-1], indirect:n; */
int indexOf(char c, char const *buf, unsigned n);

Our specification seems fine: the result value is usually the number of loop iterations, and therefore it depends indirectly on the related arguments.

However, the following implementation contradicts it:

int indexOf(char c, char const *buf, unsigned n) {
  unsigned i;
  for (i = 0; i < n; i++) {
    if (buf[i] == c) return i;
  }
  return n;
}

void main() {
  int i1 = indexOf('a', "abc", 3);
  int i2 = indexOf('z', "abc", 3);
}

If we run frama-c -calldeps -show-indirect-deps (that is, run the From plugin with callwise dependencies, showing indirect dependencies) in this example, we will obtain this output:

[from] ====== DISPLAYING CALLWISE DEPENDENCIES ======
[from] call to indexOf at ambiguous.c:10 (by main):
  \result FROM indirect: c; buf; n; "abc"[bits 0 to 7]
[from] call to indexOf at ambiguous.c:11 (by main):
  \result FROM indirect: c; buf; n; "abc"[bits 0 to 23]; direct: n
[from] entry point:
  NO EFFECTS
[from] ====== END OF CALLWISE DEPENDENCIES ======

Note that, in the second call, n is computed as a direct dependency. Indeed, it is directly assigned to the return value in the code. This means that our specification is possibly unsound, since it states that n is at most an indirect dependency of \result.

However, if we modify our implementation of indexOf to return i instead of n, then From will compute n as an indirect dependency, and thus our specification could be considered correct. The conclusion is that, in some situations, both versions can be considered correct, and this not will affect the end result.

One specific case where such discussions may be relevant is the case of the memcmp function of the C standard library (specified in string.h): one common implementation consists in comparing each byte of both arrays, say s1[i] and s2[i], and returning s1[i] - s2[i] if they are different. One could argue that such an implementation would imply that assigns \result \from s1[0 ..], s2[0 ..], with direct dependencies. However, this can create undesirable garbled mix, so a better approach would be to consider them as indirect dependencies. In such situations, the best specification is not a clear-cut decision.

Frama-C libc being updated

The Frama-C stdlib has lots of specifications that still need to be updated to take indirect into account. This is being done over time, which means that unfortunately they do not yet constitute a good example of best practices. This is improving with each release, and soon they should offer good examples for several C standard library functions. Until then, you may refer to this tutorial or ask the Frama-C community for recommendations to your specifications.

Also note that some of these recommendations may not be the most relevant ones when considering other plugins, such as WP. Still, most tips here are sufficiently general that they should help you improve your ACSL for all purposes.

(with the collaboration of F. Kirchner, V. Prevosto and B. Yakobowski)

Users of the Value plugin often need to use functions for which there is no available code, or whose code could be abstracted away. In such cases, ACSL specifications often come in handy. Our colleagues at Fraunhofer prepared the excellent ACSL by example report, but it is mostly directed at WP-style proofs.

In this post we explain how to specify in ACSL a simple function, in a way that is optimal for Value.

Prerequisites:

• Basic knowledge of Value;
• Basic knowledge of ACSL.

The messages and behaviors presented here are those of Frama-C Aluminium. Using another version of Frama-C might lead to different results.

A simple function

In this tutorial, we proceed in a gradual manner to isolate problems and make sure that each step works as intended. Let us consider the following informal specification:

// returns a random character between buf[0] and buf[n-1]
char get_random_char(char const *buf, unsigned n);

A minimal ACSL specification for this function must check two things:

1. that n is strictly positive: otherwise, we'd have to select a character among an empty set, thereby killing any logician that would wander around at that time (buf is a byte array that may contain \0, so that there is no obvious way to return a default value in case n == 0);
2. that we are allowed (legally, as per the C standard) to read characters between buf[0] and buf[n-1];

The following specification ensures both:

/*@
  requires n > 0;
  requires \valid_read(buf+(0 .. n-1));
*/
char get_random_char(char const *buf, unsigned n);

Note the spaces between the bounds in 0 .. n-1. A common issue, when beginning to write ACSL specifications, is to write ranges such as 0..n-1 without spaces around the dots. It works in most cases, but as 0..n is a floating-point preprocessing token (yes, this looks strange, but you can see it yourself in section 6.4.8 of C11 standard if you're not convinced) funny things might happen when pre-processing the annotation. For instance, if we had a macro MAX instead of n, (e.g. #define MAX 255), then writing [0..MAX] would result in the following error message: [kernel] user error: unbound logic variable MAX, since the pre-processor would dutifully consider 0..MAX as a single token, thus would not perform the expansion of MAX. For that reason, we recommend always writing ranges with spaces around the dots.

To check our specification, we devise a main function that simply calls get_random_char with the appropriate arguments:

void main() {
  char *buf = "abc";
  char c = get_random_char(buf, 3);
}

Then, if we run this with Value (frama-c -val), it will produce the expected result, but with a warning:

[kernel] warning: No code nor implicit assigns clause for function get_random_char, generating default assigns from the prototype

By printing the output of Frama-C's normalisation (frama-c -print), we can see what its generated assigns clause looks like:

assigns \result;
assigns \result \from *(buf+(0 ..)), n;

Despite the warning, Frama-C kernel generated a clause that is correct and not too imprecise in this case. But we should not rely on that and avoid this warning whenever possible, by writing our own assigns clauses:

/*@
  requires n > 0;
  requires \valid_read(buf+(0 .. n-1));
  assigns \result \from buf[0 .. n-1], n;
*/
char get_random_char(char const *buf, unsigned n);

Running Value again will not emit any warnings, plus it will indicate that both preconditions were validated:

[kernel] Parsing FRAMAC_SHARE/libc/__fc_builtin_for_normalization.i (no preprocessing)
[kernel] Parsing file.c (with preprocessing)
[value] Analyzing a complete application starting at main
[value] Computing initial state
[value] Initial state computed
[value] Values of globals at initialization

[value] computing for function get_random_char <- main.
        Called from file.c:10.
[value] using specification for function get_random_char
file.c:2:[value] function get_random_char: precondition got status valid.
file.c:3:[value] function get_random_char: precondition got status valid.
[value] Done for function get_random_char
[value] Recording results for main
[value] done for function main
[value] ====== VALUES COMPUTED ======
[value] Values at end of function main:
  buf ∈ {{ "abc" }}
  c ∈ [--..--]

However, the result is still imprecise: c ∈ [--..--], that is, it may contain any character, not only 'a', 'b' or 'c'. This is expected: assigns \from ... clauses are used by Value to compute dependencies information, but they are not sufficient to constrain the exact contents of the assigned variables. We need to use postconditions for that, that is, ensures clauses.

The following ensures clause states that the result value must be one of the characters in buf[0 .. n-1]:

ensures \subset(\result, buf[0 .. n-1]);

The ACSL \subset predicate is interpreted by Value, which isolates the characters in buf, and thus returns a precise result: c ∈ {97; 98; 99}. Note that Value prints the result as integers, not as ASCII characters.

This concludes the specification of a very simple partial function. But what if we want to take into account more possibilities, e.g. a NULL pointer in buf, or n == 0?

First try: a robust and concise specification

Our get_random_char function is simple, but not robust. It is vulnerable to accidents and attacks. Let us apply some Postel-style recommendations and be liberal in what we accept from others: instead of expecting that the user will not pass a NULL pointer or n == 0, we want to accept these cases, but return an error code if they happen.

We have two choices: add an extra argument to get_random_char that represents the result status (OK/error), or use the return value as the status itself, and return the character via a pointer. Here, we will adopt the latter approach:

typedef enum { OK, NULL_PTR, INVALID_LEN } status;

// if buf != NULL and n > 0, copies a random character from buf[0 .. n-1]
// into *out and returns OK.
// Otherwise, returns NULL_PTR if buf == NULL, or INVALID_LEN if n == 0.
status safe_get_random_char(char *out, char const *buf, unsigned n);

We could also have used errno here, but global variables are inelegant and, most importantly, it would defeat the purpose of this tutorial, wouldn't it?

This new function is more robust to user input, but it has a price: its specification will require more sophistication.

Before revealing the full specification, let us try a first, somewhat naive approach:

typedef enum { OK, NULL_PTR, INVALID_LEN } status;

/*@
  assigns \result, *out \from buf[0 .. n-1], n;
  ensures \subset(*out, buf[0 .. n-1]);
*/
status safe_get_random_char(char *out, char const *buf, unsigned n);

void main() {
  char *buf = "abc";
  char c;
  status res = safe_get_random_char(&c, buf, 3);
  //@ assert res == OK;
}

This specification has several errors, but we will try it anyway. We will reveal the errors as we progress.

Once again, we use a small C main function to check our specification, starting with the non-erroneous case. This reveals that Value does not return the expected result:

...
[value] Values at end of function main:
  buf ∈ {{ "abc" }}
  c ∈ [--..--] or UNINITIALIZED
  res ∈ {0}

Variable c is imprecise, despite our \ensures clause. This is due to the fact that Value will not reduce the contents of a memory location that may be uninitialized. Thus, when specifying the ensures clause of a pointed variable, it is first necessary to state that the value of that variable is properly initialized.

This behavior may evolve in future Frama-C releases. In particular, our specification could have resulted in a more precise result, such as c ∈ {97; 98; 99} or UNINITIALIZED.

Adding ensures \initialized(out); before the \ensures \subset(...) clause will allow c to be precisely reduced to {97; 98; 99}. This solves our immediate problem, but creates another: is the specification too strong? Could we have an implementation of get_random_char in which \initialized(out) does not hold?

The answer here is definitely yes, especially in the case where buf is NULL. It is arguably also the case when n == 0, although it depends on the implementation.

The most precise and correct result that we expect here is c ∈ {97; 98; 99} or UNINITIALIZED. To obtain it, we will use behaviors.

Another reason to consider using behaviors is the fact that our \assigns clause is too generic, leading to avoidable warnings by Value: because we have written that *out may be assigned, Value will try to evaluate if out is a valid pointer. If our main function includes a test such as res = safe_get_random_char(NULL, buf, 3), Value will output the following:

[value] warning: Completely invalid destination for assigns clause *out. Ignoring.

This warning is not needed here, but its presence is justified by the fact that, in many cases, it helps detect incorrect specifications, such as an extra *. Value will still accept our specification, but if we want a precise analysis, the best solution is to use behaviors to specify each case.

Second try: using behaviors

The behaviors of our function correspond to each of the three cases of enum status:

1. NULL_PTR when either out or buf are NULL;
2. INVALID_LEN when out and buf are not NULL but n == 0;
3. OK otherwise.

ACSL behaviors can be named, improving readability and generating more precise error messages. We will define a set of complete and disjoint behaviors; this is not required in ACSL, but for simple functions it often matches more closely what the code would actually do, and is simpler to reason about.

One important remark is that disjoint and complete behaviors are not checked by Value. The value analysis does take them into account to improve its precision when possible, but if they are incorrectly specified, Value may not be able to warn the user about it.

Here is one way to specify three disjoint behaviors for this function, using mutually exclusive assumes clauses.

/*@
  behavior ok:
    assumes out != null && buf != \null;
    assumes n > 0;
    requires \valid_read(buf+(0 .. n-1));
    requires \valid(out);
    // TODO: assigns and ensures clauses
  behavior null_ptr:
    assumes out == \null || buf == \null;
    // TODO: assigns and ensures clauses
  behavior invalid_len:
    assumes out != \null && buf != \null;
    assumes n == 0;
    // TODO: assigns and ensures clauses
*/
status safe_get_random_char(char *out, char const *buf, unsigned n);

Our choice of behaviors is not unique: we could have defined, for instance, two behaviors for null pointers, e.g. null_out and null_buf; but the return value is the same for both, so this would not improve precision.

Note that assumes and requires play different roles in ACSL: assumes are used to determine which behavior(s) are active, while requires impose constraints on the pre-state of the function or current behavior. For instance, one should not specify assumes \valid(out) in one behavior and assumes !\valid(out) in another: what this specification would actually mean is that the corresponding C function should somehow be able to distinguish between locations where it can write and locations where it cannot, as if one could write if (valid_pointer(buf)) in the C code. In practical terms, the main consequence is that such a specification would prevent Value from detecting errors related to memory validity.

For a more concrete example of the difference between them, you may consult the small appendix at the end of this post.

Assigns clauses in behaviors

Our specification for safe_get_random_char is incomplete: it has no assigns or ensures clauses.

Writing assigns clauses in behaviors is not always trivial, so here is a small, simplified summary of the main rules concerning the specification of such clauses for an analysis with Value:

1. Global (default) assigns must always be present (even for complete behaviors), and must be at least as general as the assigns clauses in each behavior;
2. Behaviors only need assigns clauses when they are more specific than the global one.
3. Having a complete behaviors clause allows the global behavior to be ignored during the evaluation of the post-state, which may lead to a more precise result; but the global assigns must still be present.

Note: behavior inclusion is not currently checked by Value. Therefore, if a behavior's assigns clause is not included in the default one, the result is undefined.

Also, the reason why assigns specifications are verbose and partially redundant is in part because not every Frama-C plugin is able to precisely handle behaviors. They use the global assigns in this case.

For ensures clauses, the situation is simpler: global and local ensures clauses are simply merged with an implicit logical AND between them.

The following specification is a complete example of the usage of behaviors, with precise ensures clauses for both outputs (\result and out). The main function below tests each use case, and running Value results in valid statuses for all preconditions and assertions. The \from terms in the assigns clauses are detailed further below.

#include <stdlib.h>
typedef enum {OK, NULL_PTR, INVALID_LEN} status;

/*@
  assigns \result \from out, buf, n;
  assigns *out \from out, buf, buf[0 .. n-1], n;
  behavior null_ptr:
    assumes out == \null || buf == \null;
    assigns \result \from out, buf, n;
    ensures \result == NULL_PTR;
  behavior invalid_len:
    assumes out != \null && buf != \null;
    assumes n == 0;
    assigns \result \from out, buf, n;
    ensures \result == INVALID_LEN;
  behavior ok:
    assumes out != \null && buf != \null;
    assumes n > 0;
    requires \valid(out);
    requires \valid_read(&buf[0 .. n-1]);
    ensures \result == OK;
    ensures \initialized(out);
    ensures \subset(*out, buf[0 .. n-1]);
  complete behaviors;
  disjoint behaviors;
 */
status safe_get_random_char(char *out, char const *buf, unsigned n);

void main() {
  char *msg = "abc";
  int len_arr = 4;
  status res;
  char c;
  res = safe_get_random_char(&c, msg, len_arr);
  //@ assert res == OK;
  res = safe_get_random_char(&c, NULL, len_arr);
  //@ assert res == NULL_PTR;
  res = safe_get_random_char(NULL, msg, len_arr);
  //@ assert res == NULL_PTR;
  res = safe_get_random_char(&c, msg, 0);
  //@ assert res == INVALID_LEN;
}

Our specification includes several functional dependencies (\from), but there is still one missing. Can you guess which one? The answer, as well as more details about why and how to write functional dependencies, will appear in the next post. Stay tuned!

Appendix: example of the difference between requires and assumes clauses

This appendix presents a small concrete example of what happens when the user mistakingly uses requires clauses instead of assumes. It is directed towards beginners in ACSL.

Consider the (incorrect) example below, where bzero_char simply writes 0 to the byte pointed by the argument c:

/*@
  assigns *c \from c;
  behavior ok:
    assumes \valid(c);
    ensures *c == 0;
  behavior invalid:
    assumes !\valid(c);
    assigns \nothing;
  complete behaviors;
  disjoint behaviors;
*/
void bzero_char(char *c);

void main() {
  char *c = "abc";
  bzero_char(c);
}

In this example, Value will evaluate the validity of the pointer c, and conclude that, because it comes from a string literal, it may not be written to (therefore \valid(c) is false). Value then does nothing and returns, without any warnings or error messages.

However, had we written it the recommended way, the result would be more useful:

/*@
  assigns *c \from c;
  behavior ok:
    assumes c != \null;
    requires \valid(c);
    ensures *c == 0;
  behavior invalid:
    assumes c == \null;
    assigns \nothing;
  complete behaviors;
  disjoint behaviors;
*/
void bzero_char(char *c);

void main() {
  char *c = "abc";
  bzero_char(c);
}

In this case, Value will evaluate c as non-null, and will therefore activate behavior ok. This behavior has a requires clause, therefore Value will check that memory location c can be written to. Because this is not the case, Value will emit an alarm:

[value] warning: function bzero_char, behavior ok: precondition got status invalid.

Note that checking whether c is null or non-null is something that can be done in the C code, while checking whether a given pointer p is a valid memory location is not. As a rule of thumb, conditions in the code correspond to assumes clauses in behaviors, while requires clauses correspond to semantic properties, function prerequisites that cannot necessarily be tested by the implementation.