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Abstract Execution

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Book cover Formal Methods – The Next 30 Years (FM 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 11800))

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Abstract

We propose a new static software analysis principle called Abstract Execution, generalizing Symbolic Execution: While the latter analyzes all possible execution paths of a specific program, Abstract Execution analyzes a partially unspecified program by permitting abstract symbols representing unknown contexts. For each abstract symbol, we faithfully represent each possible concrete execution resulting from its substitution with concrete code. There is a wide range of applications of Abstract Execution, especially for verifying relational properties of schematic programs. We implemented Abstract Execution in a deductive verification framework and proved correctness of eight well-known statement-level refactoring rules, including two with loops. For each refactoring we characterize the preconditions that make it semantics-preserving. Most preconditions are not mentioned in the literature.

This work was funded by the Hessian LOEWE initiative within the Software-Factory 4.0 project.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    If the statement causes a split, like an statement, we still can combine the arising sequents to a single one by state merging [27].

  2. 2.

    It is possible that, for instance, during returning an exception is thrown: this simply means that exception is the reason for termination.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, TU Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

    Dominic Steinhöfel & Reiner Hähnle

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  1. Dominic Steinhöfel
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  2. Reiner Hähnle
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Correspondence to Dominic Steinhöfel .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Pisa, Italy

    Maurice H. ter Beek

  2. Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Annabelle McIver

  3. University of Minho, Braga, Portugal

    José N. Oliveira

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Steinhöfel, D., Hähnle, R. (2019). Abstract Execution. In: ter Beek, M., McIver, A., Oliveira, J. (eds) Formal Methods – The Next 30 Years. FM 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11800. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30942-8_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30942-8_20

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