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Constraint-Based Contract Inference for Deductive Verification

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Deductive Software Verification: Future Perspectives

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 12345))

Abstract

Assertion-based software model checking refers to techniques that take a program annotated with logical assertions and statically verify that the assertions hold whenever program execution is at the corresponding control point. While the associated annotation overhead is relatively low, these techniques are typically monolithic in that they explore the state space of the whole program at once, and may therefore scale poorly to large programs. Deductive software verification, on the other hand, refers to techniques that prove the correctness of a piece of software against a detailed specification of what it is supposed to accomplish or compute. The associated verification techniques are modular and scale well to large code bases, but incur an annotation overhead that is often very high, which is a real obstacle for deductive verification to be adopted in industry on a wider scale. In this paper we explore synergies between the two mentioned paradigms, and in particular, investigate how interpolation-based Horn solvers used for software model checking can be instrumented to infer missing procedure contracts for use in deductive verification, thus aiding the programmer in the code annotation process. We summarise the main developments in the area of automated contract inference, and present our own experiments with contract inference for C programs, based on solving Horn clauses. To drive the inference process, we put program assertions in the main function, and adapt our TriCera tool, a model checker based on the Horn solver Eldarica, to infer candidate contracts for all other functions. The contracts are output in the ANSI C Specification Language (ACSL) format, and are then validated with the Frama-C deductive verification tool for C programs.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://github.com/uuverifiers/tricera.

  2. 2.

    https://github.com/uuverifiers/eldarica.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been partially funded by the Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems (VINNOVA) under the AVerT project 2018-02727, by the Swedish Research Council (VR) under grant 2018-04727, and by the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research (SSF) under the project WebSec (Ref. RIT17-0011).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden

    Anoud Alshnakat, Dilian Gurov & Christian Lidström

  2. Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

    Philipp Rümmer

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  1. Anoud Alshnakat
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  2. Dilian Gurov
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  3. Christian Lidström
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  4. Philipp Rümmer
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Correspondence to Philipp Rümmer .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Wolfgang Ahrendt

  2. Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany

    Bernhard Beckert

  3. Technical University of Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

    Richard Bubel

  4. Technical University of Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

    Reiner Hähnle

  5. Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany

    Mattias Ulbrich

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Alshnakat, A., Gurov, D., Lidström, C., Rümmer, P. (2020). Constraint-Based Contract Inference for Deductive Verification. In: Ahrendt, W., Beckert, B., Bubel, R., Hähnle, R., Ulbrich, M. (eds) Deductive Software Verification: Future Perspectives. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12345. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64354-6_6

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