Software model checking by program specialization

2012

We present a method for verifying properties of imperative programs by using techniques based on the specialization of constraint logic programs (CLP). We consider a class of C programs with integer variables and we focus our attention on safety properties, stating that no error configuration can be reached from the initial configurations. We encode the interpreter of the language as a CLP program I, and we also encode the safety property to be verified as the negation of a predicate unsafe defined in I. Then, we specialize the CLP program I with respect to the given C program and the given initial and error configurations, with the objective of deriving a new CLP program Isp which either contains the fact unsafe (and in this case the C program is proved unsafe) or contains no clauses with head unsafe (and in this case the C program is proved safe). If Isp does not enjoy this property we iterate the specialization process with the objective of deriving a CLP program where we can pro...

KI - Künstliche Intelligenz, 2010

SIAM Journal on Computing, 1976

2003

Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2013 workshop on Partial evaluation and program manipulation, 2013

2000

this paper, we present a reduction and termination checker which reasonsabout orders. The reduction checker verifies properties relating input and out1put. The termination checker proves properties relating inputs of the originalcall to inputs of the recursive call. Both checkers take into account alreadyderived reduction properties and reason about them. Our method can be usedin a first-order and higher-order framework. To

Formal Description Techniques VII, 1995

Based on General Term-Orderings, Selected Papers …, 2000

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2008

Theory and Practice of Logic Programming

It is well-known that the verification of partial correctness properties of imperative programs can be reduced to the satisfiability problem for constrained Horn clauses (CHCs). However, state-of-the-art solvers for constrained Horn clauses (or CHC solvers) based on predicate abstraction are sometimes unable to verify satisfiability because they look for models that are definable in a given class 𝓐 of constraints, called 𝓐-definable models. We introduce a transformation technique, called Predicate Pairing, which is able, in many interesting cases, to transform a set of clauses into an equisatisfiable set whose satisfiability can be proved by finding an 𝓐-definable model, and hence can be effectively verified by a state-of-the-art CHC solver. In particular, we prove that, under very general conditions on 𝓐, the unfold/fold transformation rules preserve the existence of an 𝓐-definable model, that is, if the original clauses have an 𝓐-definable model, then the transformed clauses have ...