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Reasoning About Exceptional Behavior at the Level of Java Bytecode

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Integrated Formal Methods (iFM 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14300))

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Abstract

A program’s exceptional behavior can substantially complicate its control flow, and hence accurately reasoning about the program’s correctness. On the other hand, formally verifying realistic programs is likely to involve exceptions—a ubiquitous feature in modern programming languages.

In this paper, we present a novel approach to verify the exceptional behavior of Java programs, which extends our previous work on ByteBack. ByteBack works on a program’s bytecode, while providing means to specify the intended behavior at the source-code level; this approach sets ByteBack apart from most state-of-the-art verifiers that target source code. To explicitly model a program’s exceptional behavior in a way that is amenable to formal reasoning, we introduce Vimp: a high-level bytecode representation that extends the Soot framework’s Grimp with verification-oriented features, thus serving as an intermediate layer between bytecode and the Boogie intermediate verification language. Working on bytecode through this intermediate layer brings flexibility and adaptability to new language versions and variants: as our experiments demonstrate, ByteBack can verify programs involving exceptional behavior in all versions of Java, as well as in Scala and Kotlin (two other popular JVM languages).

Work partially supported by SNF grant 200021-207919 (LastMile).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In the following, we occasionally take some liberties with Grimp and Vimp code, using a readable syntax that mixes bytecode instruction and Java statement syntax; for example, represents an invocation of method that corresponds to a suitable variant of bytecode’s .

  2. 2.

    Since the root of all exception types in Java is class —a concrete class—an exception type cannot be a subtype of multiple exception classes, and hence T is strictly a tree.

  3. 3.

    https://docs.oracle.com/javase/9/docs/api/java/lang/invoke/StringConcatFactory.html.

  4. 4.

    We focus on these exception-related programs, but the latest version of ByteBack also verifies correctly the 35 other programs we introduced in previous work to demonstrate its fundamental verification capabilities.

  5. 5.

    Smoke tests provide no absolute guarantee of consistency, but are often practically effective.

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URL References

  1. https://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=334

  2. https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/exceptions/runtime.html

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  4. https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/util/package-summary.html

  5. https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/javase/jdk7-relnotes.html

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Software Institute, USI Università della Svizzera italiana, Lugano, Switzerland

    Marco Paganoni & Carlo A. Furia

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  1. Marco Paganoni
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Correspondence to Marco Paganoni .

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  1. Embedded Systems Group, University of Münster, Münster, Germany

    Paula Herber

  2. Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Anton Wijs

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Paganoni, M., Furia, C.A. (2024). Reasoning About Exceptional Behavior at the Level of Java Bytecode. In: Herber, P., Wijs, A. (eds) Integrated Formal Methods. iFM 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14300. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47705-8_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47705-8_7

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