Abstract
Safe is a first-order eager functional language with facilities for programmer controlled destruction of data structures. It provides also regions, i.e. disjoint parts of the heap, where the program allocates data structures, so that the runtime system does not need a garbage collector. A region is a collection of cells, each one big enough to allocate a data constructor. Deallocating cells or regions may create dangling pointers. The language is aimed at inferring and certifying memory safety properties in a Proof Carrying Code like environment. Some of its analyses have been presented elsewhere. The one relevant to this paper is a type system and a type inference algorithm guaranteeing that well-typed programs will be free of dangling pointers at runtime.
Here we present how to generate formal certificates about the absence of dangling pointers property inferred by the compiler. The certificates are Isabelle/HOL proof scripts which can be proof-checked by this tool when loaded with a database of previously proved theorems. The key idea is proving an Isabelle/HOL theorem for each syntactic construction of the language, relating the static types inferred by the compiler to the dynamic properties about the heap that will be satisfied at runtime.
Work supported by the projects TIN2008-06622-C03-01/TIN (STAMP), S2009/TIC-1465 (PROMETIDOS), and MEC FPU grant AP2006-02154.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Aspinall, D., Hofmann, M.: Another Type System for In-Place Update. In: Le Métayer, D. (ed.) ESOP 2002. LNCS, vol. 2305, pp. 36–52. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)
Aspinall, D., Hofmann, M., Konečný, M.: A Type System with Usage Aspects. Journal of Functional Programming 18(2), 141–178 (2008)
Barthe, G., Grégoire, B., Kunz, C., Rezk, T.: Certificate Translation for Optimizing Compilers. In: Yi, K. (ed.) SAS 2006. LNCS, vol. 4134, pp. 301–317. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Beringer, L., Hofmann, M., Momigliano, A., Shkaravska, O.: Automatic Certification of Heap Consumption. In: Baader, F., Voronkov, A. (eds.) LPAR 2004. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 3452, pp. 347–362. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Bornat, R.: Proving Pointer Programs in Hoare Logic. In: Backhouse, R., Oliveira, J.N. (eds.) MPC 2000. LNCS, vol. 1837, pp. 102–126. Springer, Heidelberg (2000)
de Dios, J., Peña, R.: A Certified Implementation on top of the Java Virtual Machine. In: Alpuente, M. (ed.) FMICS 2009. LNCS, vol. 5825, pp. 181–196. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
de Dios, J., Peña, R.: Formal Certification of a Resource-Aware Language Implementation. In: Berghofer, S., Nipkow, T., Urban, C., Wenzel, M. (eds.) TPHOL 2009. LNCS, vol. 5674, pp. 196–211. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Hofmann, M., Jost, S.: Static prediction of heap space usage for first-order functional programs. In: Proc. 30th ACM Symp. on Principles of Programming Languages, POPL 2003, pp. 185–197. ACM Press, New York (2003)
Luckham, D.C., Suzuki, N.: Verification of array, record and pointer operations in Pascal. ACM Trans. on Prog. Lang. and Systems 1(2), 226–244 (1979)
Mehta, F., Nipkow, T.: Proving Pointer Programs in Higher-Order Logic. In: Baader, F. (ed.) CADE 2003. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 2741, pp. 121–135. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Montenegro, M., Peña, R., Segura, C.: A Type System for Safe Memory Management and its Proof of Correctness. In: ACM Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming, PPDP 2008, Valencia, Spain, pp. 152–162 (July 2008)
Montenegro, M., Peña, R., Segura, C.: An Inference Algorithm for Guaranteeing Safe Destruction. In: Hanus, M. (ed.) LOPSTR 2008. LNCS, vol. 5438, pp. 135–151. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Montenegro, M., Peña, R., Segura, C.: A simple region inference algorithm for a first-order functional language. In: Escobar, S. (ed.) WFLP 2009. LNCS, vol. 5979, pp. 145–161. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Necula, G.C.: Proof-Carrying Code. In: ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Principles of Programming Languages, POPL 1997, pp. 106–119. ACM Press, New York (1997)
Necula, G.C., Lee, P.: Safe Kernel Extensions Without Run-Time Checking. In: Proceedings of the Second Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, Seattle, Washington, pp. 229–243 (October 1996)
Nipkow, T., Paulson, L., Wenzel, M.: Isabelle/HOL. A Proof Assistant for Higher-Order Logic. LNCS, vol. 2283. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
de Dios, J., Montenegro, M., Peña, R. (2010). Certified Absence of Dangling Pointers in a Language with Explicit Deallocation. In: Méry, D., Merz, S. (eds) Integrated Formal Methods. IFM 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6396. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-16265-7_22
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-16265-7_22
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-16264-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-16265-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)