Integrating Static Checking and Interactive Verification: Supporting Multiple Theories and Provers in Verification

Abstract

Abstract. Automatic verification by means of extended static checking (ESC)has seen some success in industry and academia due to its lightweight and easyto-use nature. Unfortunately, ESC comes at a cost: a host of logical and practical completeness and soundness issues. Interactive verification technology, on the other hand, is usually complete and sound, but requires a large amount of mathematical and practical expertise. Most programmers can be expected to use automatic, but not interactive, verification. The focus of this proposal is to integrate these two approaches into a single theoretical and practical framework, leveraging the benefits of each approach.

Early detection of JML specification errors using ESC/Java2

“…Currently ESC/Java2 (and Spec#'s Boogie) make use of Simplify [9]. Noteworthy efforts have been deployed in the past two years so that new backends (e.g., CVC3) should be available for use with ESC/Java2 before year's end [17]. As indicated in the diagram, the prover is also provided with a Universal Background Predicate containing an axiomatization of concepts true of all Java programs, and a Type-specific Background Predicate which, as the name implies, axiomatizes concepts that are specific to the type (class or interface) being processed.…”

Representing and Reasoning with Operational Semantics

“…One of the goals of the Parsifal project at INRIA is to use this two level logic approach to reason formally about operational semantics, say, in the context of the POPLmark challenge [2]. We also hope to use this framework to reason about specification logics themselves: for example, to prove soundness of logics used to annotate programming languages for extended static checking, such as the ESC/Java2 object logic [22]. Consistency of two simpler object-logics have been proved in [26] by showing showing formally in (a subset of) LINC that cut-elimination holds for them.…”