Semantics-based generation of verification conditions by program specialization

Angelis, Emanuele De; Fioravanti, Fabio; Pettorossi, Alberto; Proietti, Maurizio

doi:10.1145/2790449.2790529

Cited by 23 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…The CHC Specialization strategy we consider in this paper is a variant of specialization techniques for (constraint) logic programs which have been proposed to support program verification [1,11,13,15,24,28,29,34,37]. However, these techniques are focused on the verification of partial or total correctness of single programs, and not on the relational verification.…”

Section: Related Work and Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Predicate Pairing with Abstraction for Relational Verification

Angelis

Fioravanti

Pettorossi

et al. 2018

Logic-Based Program Synthesis and Transformation

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Relational verification is a technique that aims at proving properties that relate two different program fragments, or two different program runs. It has been shown that constrained Horn clauses (CHCs) can effectively be used for relational verification by applying a CHC transformation, called predicate pairing, which allows the CHC solver to infer relations among arguments of different predicates. In this paper we study how the effects of the predicate pairing transformation can be enhanced by using various abstract domains based on linear arithmetic (i.e., the domain of convex polyhedra and some of its subdomains) during the transformation. After presenting an algorithm for predicate pairing with abstraction, we report on the experiments we have performed on over a hundred relational verification problems by using various abstract domains. The experiments have been performed by using the VeriMAP transformation and verification system, together with the Parma Polyhedra Library (PPL) and the Z3 solver for CHCs.

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Section: Related Work and Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Predicate Pairing with Abstraction for Relational Verification

Angelis

Fioravanti

Pettorossi

et al. 2018

Logic-Based Program Synthesis and Transformation

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“…A time limit of five minutes has been set for all problems. (The experimental settings are slightly different from those used in a previous work of ours [12]. )…”

Section: Experimental Evaluationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Semantics-based generation of verification conditions via program specialization

Angelis

Fioravanti

Pettorossi

et al. 2017

Science of Computer Programming

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We present a method for automatically generating verification conditions for a class of imperative programs and safety properties. Our method is parametric with respect to the semantics of the imperative programming language, as it generates the verification conditions by specializing, using unfold/fold transformation rules, a Horn clause interpreter that encodes that semantics.We define a multi-step operational semantics for a fragment of the C language and compare the verification conditions obtained by using this semantics with those obtained by using a more traditional small-step semantics. The flexibility of the approach is further demonstrated by showing that it is possible to easily take into account alternative operational semantics definitions for modeling additional language features. We have proved that the verification condition generation takes a number of transformation steps that is linear with respect to the size of the imperative program to be verified. Also the size of the verification conditions is linear with respect to the size of the imperative program. Besides the theoretical computational complexity analysis, we also provide an experimental evaluation of the method by generating verification conditions using the multi-step and the small-step semantics for a few hundreds of programs taken from various publicly available benchmarks, and by checking the satisfiability of these verification conditions by using state-of-the-art Horn clause solvers. These experiments show that automated verification of programs from a formal definition of the operational semantics is indeed feasible in practice.

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“…Semantics-based methods for translating sequential imperative programs to Horn clauses are explained in Ref. [26]. Furthermore techniques for representing multi-threaded code as Horn clauses have been developed [27].…”

Section: Ict -Energy Concepts For Energy Efficiency and Sustainabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Energy-Aware Software Engineering

Eder¹,

Gallagher

2017

ICT - Energy Concepts for Energy Efficiency and Sustainability

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A great deal of energy in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) systems can be wasted by software, regardless of how energy-efficient the underlying hardware is. To avoid such waste, programmers need to understand the energy consumption of programs during the development process rather than waiting to measure energy after deployment. Such understanding is hindered by the large conceptual gap from hardware, where energy is consumed, to high-level languages and programming abstractions. The approaches described in this chapter involve two main topics: energy modelling and energy analysis. The purpose of modelling is to attribute energy values to programming constructs, whether at the level of machine instructions, intermediate code or source code. Energy analysis involves inferring the energy consumption of a program from the program semantics along with an energy model. Finally, the chapter discusses how energy analysis and modelling techniques can be incorporated in software engineering tools, including existing compilers, to assist the energy-aware programmer to optimise the energy consumption of code.

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Semantics-based generation of verification conditions by program specialization

Cited by 23 publications

References 41 publications

Predicate Pairing with Abstraction for Relational Verification

Predicate Pairing with Abstraction for Relational Verification

Semantics-based generation of verification conditions via program specialization

Energy-Aware Software Engineering

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