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Temporal property verification as a program analysis task

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Abstract

We describe a reduction from temporal property verification to a program analysis problem. First we present a proof system that, unlike the standard formulation, is more amenable to reasoning about infinite-state systems: disjunction is treated by partitioning, rather than enumerating, the state space and temporal operators are characterized with special sets of states called frontiers. We then describe a transformation that, with the use of procedures and nondeterminism, enables off-the-shelf program analysis tools to naturally perform the reasoning necessary for proving temporal properties (e.g. backtracking, eventuality checking, tree counterexamples for branching-time properties, abstraction refinement, etc.). Using examples drawn from the PostgreSQL database server, Apache web server, and Windows OS kernel, we demonstrate the practical viability of our work.

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Notes

  1. This is an adaptation of a known technique [18]. However, rather than using assert to check that one of the ranking functions in \(\mathcal {M}\) holds, our encoding instead returns false, allowing other possibilities to be considered (if any exist) in outer disjunctive or AF formulae.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Josh Berdine, Michael Greenberg, Daniel Kroening, Axel Legay, Rupak Majumdar, Peter O’Hearn, Joel Ouaknine, Nir Piterman, Andreas Podelski, Noam Rinetzky, and Hongseok Yang for valuable discussions regarding this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Microsoft Research and University College London, London, UK

    Byron Cook

  2. New York University, New York, NY, USA

    Eric Koskinen

  3. Rice University, Houston, TX, USA

    Moshe Vardi

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  1. Byron Cook
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Correspondence to Eric Koskinen.

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Cook, B., Koskinen, E. & Vardi, M. Temporal property verification as a program analysis task. Form Methods Syst Des 41, 66–82 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10703-012-0153-5

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