SIMULATING REACHABILITY USING FIRST-ORDER LOGIC WITH APPLICATIONS TO VERIFICATION OF LINKED DATA STRUCTURES
Publication Date
2009
Journal or Book Title
LOGICAL METHODS IN COMPUTER SCIENCE
Abstract
This paper shows how to harness existing theorem provers for first-order logic to automatically verify safety properties of imperative programs that perform dynamic storage allocation and destructive updating of pointer-valued structure fields. One of the main obstacles is specifying and proving the (absence) of reachability properties among dynamically allocated cells.
The main technical contributions are methods for simulating reachability in a conservative way using first-order formulas—the formulas describe a superset of the set of program states that can actually arise. These methods are employed for semi-automatic program verification (i.e., using programmer-supplied loop invariants) on programs such as mark-and-sweep garbage collection and destructive reversal of a singly linked list. (The mark-and-sweep example has been previously reported as being beyond the capabilities of ESC/Java.)
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/11532231_8
Pages
-
Volume
5
Issue
2
Recommended Citation
Lev-Ami, T; Immerman, N; Reps, TW; Sagiv, M; Srivastava, S; and Yorsh, G, "SIMULATING REACHABILITY USING FIRST-ORDER LOGIC WITH APPLICATIONS TO VERIFICATION OF LINKED DATA STRUCTURES" (2009). LOGICAL METHODS IN COMPUTER SCIENCE. 557.
https://doi.org/10.1007/11532231_8