Proving Non-Termination via Loop Acceleration

We present the first approach to prove non-termination of integer programs that is based on loop acceleration. If our technique cannot show non-termination of a loop, it tries to accelerate it instead in order to find paths to other non-terminating loops automatically. The prerequisites for our novel loop acceleration technique generalize a simple yet effective non-termination criterion. Thus, we can use the same program transformations to facilitate both non-termination proving and loop acceleration. In particular, we present a novel invariant inference technique that is tailored to our approach. An extensive evaluation of our fully automated tool LoAT shows that it is competitive with the state of the art

Finding Inductive Loop Invariants using Large Language Models

Loop invariants are fundamental to reasoning about programs with loops. They establish properties about a given loop's behavior. When they additionally are inductive, they become useful for the task of formal verification that seeks to establish strong mathematical guarantees about program's runtime behavior. The inductiveness ensures that the invariants can be checked locally without consulting the entire program, thus are indispensable artifacts in a formal proof of correctness. Finding inductive loop invariants is an undecidable problem, and despite a long history of research towards practical solutions, it remains far from a solved problem. This paper investigates the capabilities of the Large Language Models (LLMs) in offering a new solution towards this old, yet important problem. To that end, we first curate a dataset of verification problems on programs with loops. Next, we design a prompt for exploiting LLMs, obtaining inductive loop invariants, that are checked for correctness using sound symbolic tools. Finally, we explore the effectiveness of using an efficient combination of a symbolic tool and an LLM on our dataset and compare it against a purely symbolic baseline. Our results demonstrate that LLMs can help improve the state-of-the-art in automated program verification

A Calculus for Modular Loop Acceleration

Loop acceleration can be used to prove safety, reachability, runtime bounds, and (non-)termination of programs operating on integers. To this end, a variety of acceleration techniques has been proposed. However, all of them are monolithic: Either they accelerate a loop successfully or they fail completely. In contrast, we present a calculus that allows for combining acceleration techniques in a modular way and we show how to integrate many existing acceleration techniques into our calculus. Moreover, we propose two novel acceleration techniques that can be incorporated into our calculus seamlessly. An empirical evaluation demonstrates the applicability of our approach

Proving Non-Termination via Loop Acceleration

We present the first approach to prove non-termination of integer programs that is based on loop acceleration. If our technique cannot show non-termination of a loop, it tries to accelerate it instead in order to find paths to other non-terminating loops automatically. The prerequisites for our novel loop acceleration technique generalize a simple yet effective non-termination criterion. Thus, we can use the same program transformations to facilitate both non-termination proving and loop acceleration. In particular, we present a novel invariant inference technique that is tailored to our approach. An extensive evaluation of our fully automated tool LoAT shows that it is competitive with the state of the art

A Calculus for Modular Loop Acceleration

Loop acceleration can be used to prove safety, reachability, runtime bounds, and (non-)termination of programs operating on integers. To this end, a variety of acceleration techniques has been proposed. However, all of them are monolithic: Either they accelerate a loop successfully or they fail completely. In contrast, we present a calculus that allows for combining acceleration techniques in a modular way and we show how to integrate many existing acceleration techniques into our calculus. Moreover, we propose two novel acceleration techniques that can be incorporated into our calculus seamlessly. An empirical evaluation demonstrates the applicability of our approach

Verification and refutation of C programs based on k -induction and invariant inference

From Springer Nature via Jisc Publications RouterHistory: registration 2020-04-23, online 2020-05-18, pub-electronic 2020-05-18, pub-print 2021-04Publication status: PublishedFunder: University of ManchesterAbstract: DepthK is a source-to-source transformation tool that employs bounded model checking (BMC) to verify and falsify safety properties in single- and multi-threaded C programs, without manual annotation of loop invariants. Here, we describe and evaluate a proof-by-induction algorithm that combines k-induction with invariant inference to prove and refute safety properties. We apply two invariant generators to produce program invariants and feed these into a k-induction-based verification algorithm implemented in DepthK, which uses the efficient SMT-based context-bounded model checker (ESBMC) as sequential verification back-end. A set of C benchmarks from the International Competition on Software Verification (SV-COMP) and embedded-system applications extracted from the available literature are used to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Experimental results show that k-induction with invariants can handle a wide variety of safety properties, in typical programs with loops and embedded software applications from the telecommunications, control systems, and medical domains. The results of our comparative evaluation extend the knowledge about approaches that rely on both BMC and k-induction for software verification, in the following ways. (1) The proposed method outperforms the existing implementations that use k-induction with an interval-invariant generator (e.g., 2LS and ESBMC), in the category ConcurrencySafety, and overcame, in others categories, such as SoftwareSystems, other software verifiers that use plain BMC (e.g., CBMC). Also, (2) it is more precise than other verifiers based on the property-directed reachability (PDR) algorithm (i.e., SeaHorn, Vvt and CPAchecker-CTIGAR). This way, our methodology demonstrated improvement over existing BMC and k-induction-based approaches

Accelerating invariant generation

Acceleration is a technique for summarising loops by computing a closed-form representation of the loop behaviour. The closed form can be turned into an accelerator, which is a code snippet that skips over intermediate states of the loop to the end of the loop in a single step. Program analysers rely on invariant generation techniques to reason about loops. The state-of-the-art invariant generation techniques, in practice, often struggle to find concise loop invariants, and, instead, degrade into unrolling loops, which is ineffective for non-trivial programs. In this paper, we evaluate experimentally whether loop accelerators enable existing program analysis algorithm to discover loop invariants more reliably and more efficiently. This paper is the first comprehensive study on the synergies between acceleration and invariant generation. We report our experience with a collection of safe and unsafe programs drawn from the Software Verification Competition and the literature

Accelerating invariant generation

Acceleration is a technique for summarising loops by computing a closed-form representation of the loop behaviour. The closed form can be turned into an accelerator, which is a code snippet that skips over intermediate states of the loop to the end of the loop in a single step. Program analysers rely on invariant generation techniques to reason about loops. The state-of-the-art invariant generation techniques, in practice, often struggle to find concise loop invariants, and, instead, degrade into unrolling loops, which is ineffective for non-trivial programs. In this paper, we evaluate experimentally whether loop accelerators enable existing program analysis algorithm to discover loop invariants more reliably and more efficiently. This paper is the first comprehensive study on the synergies between acceleration and invariant generation. We report our experience with a collection of safe and unsafe programs drawn from the Software Verification Competition and the literature

Accelerating invariant generation

Acceleration is a technique for summarising loops by computing a closed-form representation of the loop behaviour. The closed form can be turned into an accelerator, which is a code snippet that skips over intermediate states of the loop to the end of the loop in a single step. Program analysers rely on invariant generation techniques to reason about loops. The state-of-the-art invariant generation techniques, in practice, often struggle to find concise loop invariants, and, instead, degrade into unrolling loops, which is ineffective for non-trivial programs. In this paper, we evaluate experimentally whether loop accelerators enable existing program analysis algorithm to discover loop invariants more reliably and more efficiently. This paper is the first comprehensive study on the synergies between acceleration and invariant generation. We report our experience with a collection of safe and unsafe programs drawn from the Software Verification Competition and the literature