Article

Automatic Inference of Necessary Preconditions

Authors:

Patrick Cousot,

Manuel Fähndrich,

Francesco LogozzoAuthors Info & Claims

VMCAI 2013: Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation - Volume 7737

Pages 128 - 148

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35873-9_10

Published: 20 January 2013 Publication History

Abstract

We consider the problem of automatic precondition inference. We argue that the common notion of sufficient precondition inference i.e., under which precondition is the program correct? imposes too large a burden on callers, and hence it is unfit for automatic program analysis. Therefore, we define the problem of necessary precondition inference i.e., under which precondition, if violated, will the program always be incorrect?. We designed and implemented several new abstract interpretation-based analyses to infer atomic, disjunctive, universally and existentially quantified necessary preconditions.

We experimentally validated the analyses on large scale industrial code. For unannotated code, the inference algorithms find necessary preconditions for almost 64% of methods which contained warnings. In 27% of these cases the inferred preconditions were also sufficient, meaning all warnings within the method body disappeared. For annotated code, the inference algorithms find necessary preconditions for over 68% of methods with warnings. In almost 50% of these cases the preconditions were also sufficient. Overall, the precision improvement obtained by precondition inference counted as the additional number of methods with no warnings ranged between 9% and 21%.

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cover image Guide Proceedings

VMCAI 2013: Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation - Volume 7737

January 2013

554 pages

ISBN:9783642358722

Editors:
Roberto Giacobazzi
Department of Computer Science, University of Verona, Verona, Italy
,
Josh Berdine
Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK
,
Isabella Mastroeni
Department of Computer Science, University of Verona, Verona, Italy

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Springer-Verlag

Berlin, Heidelberg

Publication History

Published: 20 January 2013

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Verbeek FSefat MFu ZRavindran B(2025)On Extending Incorrectness Logic with Backwards ReasoningProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/37048509:POPL(391-415)Online publication date: 9-Jan-2025
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