research-article

Automatic inference of specifications using matching logic

Authors:

María Alpuente,

Marco A. Feliú,

Alicia VillanuevaAuthors Info & Claims

PEPM '13: Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2013 workshop on Partial evaluation and program manipulation

Pages 127 - 136

https://doi.org/10.1145/2426890.2426914

Published: 21 January 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Formal specifications can be used for various software engineering activities ranging from finding errors to documenting software and automatic test-case generation. Automatically discovering specifications for heap-manipulating programs is a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a technique for automatically inferring formal specifications from C code which is based on the symbolic execution and automated reasoning tandem "Matching Logic/K framework". We implemented our technique for a fragment of C called KernelC, in the automated tool KingSpec, which generates axioms that describe the precise input/output behavior of C routines that handle pointer-based structures, i.e., result values and state change. These specifications can be written either in Matching Logic itself, which is useful for further automated analysis within the K formal environment, or in sugared axiomatic form, which favors better human inspection. Since we rely on rewriting logic K semantics specification of programming languages, our approach can be easily extended to any language for which %that a formal semantics in K is given.

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Cited By

Gissurarson MRoque DKoppel J(2023)Spectacular: Finding Laws from 25 Trillion Terms2023 IEEE Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST)10.1109/ICST57152.2023.00035(293-304)Online publication date: Apr-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICST57152.2023.00035
Qin SHe GChin WCraciun FHe MMing Z(2017)Automated specification inference in a combined domain via user-defined predicatesScience of Computer Programming10.1016/j.scico.2017.05.007148:C(189-212)Online publication date: 15-Nov-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.scico.2017.05.007
Alpuente MPardo DVillanueva A(2017)Symbolic Abstract Contract Synthesis in a Rewriting FrameworkLogic-Based Program Synthesis and Transformation10.1007/978-3-319-63139-4_11(187-202)Online publication date: 25-Jul-2017
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63139-4_11
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Automatic inference of specifications using matching logic
1. Theory of computation
  1. Logic
  2. Semantics and reasoning
    1. Program reasoning

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cover image ACM Conferences

PEPM '13: Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2013 workshop on Partial evaluation and program manipulation

January 2013

162 pages

ISBN:9781450318426

DOI:10.1145/2426890

Program Chairs:
Elvira Albert
Complutense University of Madrid, Spain
,
Shin-Cheng Mu
Academia Sinica, Taiwan

Copyright © 2013 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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SIGPLAN: ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages

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SIGACT: ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 21 January 2013

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POPL '13

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SIGPLAN

POPL '13: The 40th Annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages

January 21, 2013

Rome, Italy

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PEPM '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 13 of 29 submissions, 45%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 66 of 120 submissions, 55%

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Cited By

Gissurarson MRoque DKoppel J(2023)Spectacular: Finding Laws from 25 Trillion Terms2023 IEEE Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST)10.1109/ICST57152.2023.00035(293-304)Online publication date: Apr-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICST57152.2023.00035
Qin SHe GChin WCraciun FHe MMing Z(2017)Automated specification inference in a combined domain via user-defined predicatesScience of Computer Programming10.1016/j.scico.2017.05.007148:C(189-212)Online publication date: 15-Nov-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.scico.2017.05.007
Alpuente MPardo DVillanueva A(2017)Symbolic Abstract Contract Synthesis in a Rewriting FrameworkLogic-Based Program Synthesis and Transformation10.1007/978-3-319-63139-4_11(187-202)Online publication date: 25-Jul-2017
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63139-4_11
Alpuente MPardo DVillanueva A(2015)Automatic Inference of Specifications in the K FrameworkElectronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science10.4204/EPTCS.200.1200(1-17)Online publication date: 19-Dec-2015
https://doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.200.1
Roșu G(2015)From Rewriting Logic, to Programming Language Semantics, to Program VerificationLogic, Rewriting, and Concurrency10.1007/978-3-319-23165-5_28(598-616)Online publication date: 27-Aug-2015
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23165-5_28
Ghezzi CMocci ASangiorgio M(2014)Synthesis of Infinite-State Abstractions and Their Use for Software ValidationSpecification, Algebra, and Software10.1007/978-3-642-54624-2_14(276-295)Online publication date: 2014
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54624-2_14
Le QGherghina CQin SChin W(2014)Shape Analysis via Second-Order Bi-AbductionProceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computer Aided Verification - Volume 855910.1007/978-3-319-08867-9_4(52-68)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-319-08867-9_4

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