CBMC is a Bounded Model Checker for C. It can prove that (for computations of bounded depth) a C program exhibits no memory safe errors (no buffer overflows, no invalid pointers, etc), no undefined behaviors, and no failures of assertions in the code. CBMC Viewer is a tool that scans the output of CBMC and produces a browsable summary of its findings.

Here is a simple example of using cbmc-viewer. Running this example requires installing CBMC. Installation on MacOS is just brew install cbmc. Installation on other operation systems is described on the CBMC release page.

Create a source file main.c containing

#include <stdlib.h>
static int global;
int main() {
  int *ptr = malloc(sizeof(int));
  assert(global > 0);
  assert(*ptr > 0);
  return 0;
}

and run the commands

goto-cc -o main.goto main.c
cbmc main.goto --trace --xml-ui > result.xml
cbmc main.goto --cover location --xml-ui > coverage.xml
cbmc main.goto --show-properties --xml-ui > property.xml
cbmc-viewer --goto main.goto --result result.xml --coverage coverage.xml --property property.xml --srcdir .

and open the report created by cbmc-viewer in a web browser with

open report/html/index.html

What you will see is

• A coverage report summarizing what lines of source code were exercised by cbmc. In this case, coverage is 100%. Clicking on main, you can see the source code for main annotated with coverage data (all lines are green because all lines were hit).

• A bug report summarizing what issues cbmc found with the code. In this case, the bugs are violations of the assertions because, for example, it is possible that the uninitialized integer allocated on the heap contains a negative value. For each bug, there is a link to

  • The line of code where the bug occurred.

  • An error trace showing the steps of the program leading to the bug. For each step, there a link to the line of code that generated the step, making it easy to follow the error trace and root cause the bug.

The cbmc-viewer documentation includes a reference manual and a user guide. These documents are currently works in progress and will improve over time.

Most people should just follow the instructions on the release page.

Developers can install the package in Python "development mode" as follows.

• Clone the repository and install dependencies with

      git clone https://github.com/awslabs/aws-viewer-for-cbmc.git cbmc-viewer
      apt install python3-pip python3-venv python3-jinja2 python3-voluptuous universal-ctags
  

  Installing ctags is optional. See the ctags discussion at the end of the release page.
• Install development mode with

      cd cbmc-viewer
      make develop
      export PATH=/tmp/cbmc-viewer/bin:$PATH
  

• Uninstall development mode with

      cd cbmc-viewer
      make undevelop
  

See CONTRIBUTING for more information.

This project is licensed under the Apache-2.0 License.