Mechanizing Abstract Interpretation

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Date

2017

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Abstract

It is important when developing software to verify the absence of undesirable

behavior such as crashes, bugs and security vulnerabilities. Some settings

require high assurance in verification results, e.g., for embedded software in

automobiles or airplanes. To achieve high assurance in these verification

results, formal methods are used to automatically construct or check proofs of

their correctness. However, achieving high assurance for program analysis

results is challenging, and current methods are ill suited for both complex

critical domains and mainstream use.

To verify the correctness of software we consider program analyzers---automated

tools which detect software defects---and to achieve high assurance in

verification results we consider mechanized verification---a rigorous process

for establishing the correctness of program analyzers via computer-checked

proofs.

The key challenges to designing verified program analyzers are: (1) achieving

an analyzer design for a given programming language and correctness property;

(2) achieving an implementation for the design; and (3) achieving a mechanized

verification that the implementation is correct w.r.t. the design. The state of

the art in (1) and (2) is to use abstract interpretation: a guiding

mathematical framework for systematically constructing analyzers directly from

programming language semantics. However, achieving (3) in the presence of

abstract interpretation has remained an open problem since the late 1990's.

Furthermore, even the state-of-the art which achieves (3) in the absence of

abstract interpretation suffers from the inability to be reused in the presence

of new analyzer designs or programming language features.

First, we solve the open problem which has prevented the combination of

abstract interpretation (and in particular, calculational abstract

interpretation) with mechanized verification, which advances the state of the

art in designing, implementing, and verifying analyzers for critical software.

We do this through a new mathematical framework Constructive Galois Connections

which supports synthesizing specifications for program analyzers, calculating

implementations from these induced specifications, and is amenable to

mechanized verification.

Finally, we introduce reusable components for implementing analyzers for a wide

range of designs and semantics. We do this though two new frameworks Galois

Transformers and Definitional Abstract Interpreters. These frameworks tightly

couple analyzer design decisions, implementation fragments, and verification

properties into compositional components which are (target)

programming-language independent and amenable to mechanized verification.

Variations in the analysis design are then recovered by simply re-assembling

the combination of components. Using this framework, sophisticated program

analyzers can be assembled by non-experts, and the result are guaranteed to be

verified by construction.

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