AutoProof: Auto-Active Functional Verification of Object-Oriented Programs

Abstract

Auto-active verifiers provide a level of automation intermediate between fully automatic and interactive: users supply code with annotations as input while benefiting from a high level of automation in the back-end. This paper presents AutoProof, a state-of-the-art auto-active verifier for object-oriented sequential programs with complex functional specifications. AutoProof fully supports advanced objectoriented features and a powerful methodology for framing and class invariants, which make it applicable in practice to idiomatic object-oriented patterns. The paper focuses on describing AutoProof's interface, design, and implementation features, and demonstrates AutoProof's performance on a rich collection of benchmark problems. The results attest AutoProof's competitiveness among tools in its league on cutting-edge functional verification of object-oriented programs.

Complete Contracts through Specification Drivers

“…As part of the AutoProof formal verification tool [3], we have mechanically proved the correctness of the examples given in this paper.…”

A Fully Verified Container Library

“…The result is, however, largely domain-independent, as it provides general flexibility to handling class invariants and other kinds of annotations; in fact, AutoProof's performance improved after the tuning also in domains other than data-structure verification, such as algorithmic challenges [TFNP15]. We summarize some finicky features of the translation that turned out to be crucial for performance.…”

“…Since their degree of automation is intermediate between fully automatic and interactive, such tools are called auto-active [LM10a]; examples are Dafny [Lei10], VCC [CDH + 09], and VeriFast [JSP + 11], as well as AutoProof, which we developed in previous work [PTFM14,TFNP15] and significantly extended as part of the work presented here.…”

Ensuring Correctness of Model Transformations While Remaining Decidable

“…General-purpose program verication with systems such as AutoProof [24] and Dafny [18] becomes increasingly automated and thus interesting as pushbutton technology for model transformations. In this context, fragments of rstorder logic have been proposed that are decidable and are useful for dealing with pointer structures [16].…”