Smt Solvers

Republished from Teleport’s official blog (link). I received compensation from Teleport for writing this post. Z3 is a satisfiability modulo theories (SMT) solver developed by Microsoft Research. With a description like that you’d expect it to be restricted to esoteric corners of the computerized mathematics world, but it’s made impressive inroads addressing conventional software engineering needs: analyzing network ACLs and firewalls in Microsoft Azure, for example. Z3 is used to answer otherwise-unanswerable questions like “are these two firewalls equivalent? [Read More]

Lessons I’ve learned from software engineering are uniformly cynical: Abstraction almost always fails; you can’t build something on top of a system without understanding how that system works. Bleeding-edge methods are a recipe for disaster Everything good is hype and you’ll only ever get a small fraction of the utility being promised. Imagine my surprise, then, when the Z3 constraint solver from Microsoft Research effortlessly dispatched the thorniest technical problem I’ve been given in my short professional career. [Read More]