International audienceSeparation Logic is a widely used formalism for describing dynamically allocated linked data structures, such as lists, trees, etc. The decidability status of various fragments of the logic constitutes a long standing open problem. Current results report on techniques to decide satisfiability and validity of entail-ments for Separation Logic(s) over lists (possibly with data). In this paper we establish a more general decidability result. We prove that any Separation Logic formula using rather general recursively defined predicates is decidable for satis-fiability, and moreover, entailments between such formulae are decidable for validity. These predicates are general enough to define (doubly-) linked lists, trees, and structures more general than trees, such as trees whose leaves are chained in a list. The decidability proofs are by reduction to decidability of Monadic Second Order Logic on graphs with bounded tree width

We consider verification of programs manipulating dynamic linked data structures such as various forms of singly and doubly-linked lists or trees. We consider important properties for this kind of systems like no null-pointer dereferences, absence of garbage, shape properties, etc. We develop a verification method based on a novel use of tree automata to represent heap configurations. A heap is split into several "separated" parts such that each of them can be represented by a tree automaton. The automata can refer to each other allowing the different parts of the heaps to mutually refer to their boundaries. Moreover, we allow for a hierarchical representation of heaps by allowing alphabets of the tree automata to contain other, nested tree automata. Program instructions can be easily encoded as operations on our representation structure. This allows verification of programs based on symbolic state-space exploration together with refinable abstraction within the so-called abstract regular tree model checking. A motivation for the approach is to combine advantages of automata-based approaches (higher generality and flexibility of the abstraction) with some advantages of separation-logic-based approaches (efficiency). We have implemented our approach and tested it successfully on multiple non-trivial case studies.

Forest automata (FA) have recently been proposed as a tool for shape analysis of complex heap structures. FA encode sets of tree decompositions of heap graphs in the form of tuples of tree automata. In order to allow for representing complex heap graphs, the notion of FA allowed one to provide user-defined FA (called boxes) that encode repetitive graph patterns of shape graphs to be used as alphabet symbols of other, higher-level FA. In this paper, we propose a novel technique of automatically learning the FA to be used as boxes that avoids the need of providing them manually. Further, we propose a significant improvement of the automata abstraction used in the analysis. The result is an efficient, fullyautomated analysis that can handle even as complex data structures as skip lists, with the performance comparable to state-of-the-art fully-automated tools based on separation logic, which, however, specialise in dealing with linked lists only.

In this paper, we present VATA, a versatile and efficient open-source tree automata library applicable, e.g., in formal verification. The library supports both explicit and semi-symbolic encoding of non-deterministic finite tree automata and provides efficient implementation of standard operations on both. The semi-symbolic encoding is intended for tree automata with large alphabets. For storing their transition functions, a newly implemented MTBDD library is used. In order to enable the widest possible range of applications of the library even for the semi-symbolic encoding, we provide both bottom-up and top-down semi-symbolic representations. The library implements several highly optimised reduction algorithms based on downward and upward simulations as well as algorithms for testing automata inclusion based on upward and downward antichains and simulations. We compare the performance of the algorithms on a set of test cases and we also compare the performance of VATA with our previous implementations of tree automata.