Automatic cyclic termination proofs for recursive procedures in separation logic

We describe a formal verification framework and tool implementation, based upon cyclic proofs, for certifying the safe termination of imperative pointer programs with recursive procedures. Our assertions are symbolic heaps in separation logic with user defined inductive predicates; we employ explicit approximations of these predicates as our termination measures. This enables us to extend cyclic proof to programs with procedures by relating these measures across the pre- and postconditions of procedure calls. We provide an implementation of our formal proof system in the Cyclist theorem proving framework, and evaluate its performance on a range of examples drawn from the literature on program termination. Our implementation extends the current state-of-the-art in cyclic proof-based program verification, enabling automatic termination proofs of a larger set of programs than previously possible

Fifty years of Hoare's Logic

We present a history of Hoare's logic.Comment: 79 pages. To appear in Formal Aspects of Computin

S2TD: a Separation Logic Verifier that Supports Reasoning of the Absence and Presence of Bugs

Heap-manipulating programs are known to be challenging to reason about. We present a novel verifier for heap-manipulating programs called S2TD, which encodes programs systematically in the form of Constrained Horn Clauses (CHC) using a novel extension of separation logic (SL) with recursive predicates and dangling predicates. S2TD actively explores cyclic proofs to address the path explosion problem. S2TD differentiates itself from existing CHC-based verifiers by focusing on heap-manipulating programs and employing cyclic proof to efficiently verify or falsify them with counterexamples. Compared with existing SL-based verifiers, S2TD precisely specifies the heaps of de-allocated pointers to avoid false positives in reasoning about the presence of bugs. S2TD has been evaluated using a comprehensive set of benchmark programs from the SV-COMP repository. The results show that S2TD is more effective than state-of-art program verifiers and is more efficient than most of them.Comment: 24 page

12th International Workshop on Termination (WST 2012) : WST 2012, February 19–23, 2012, Obergurgl, Austria / ed. by Georg Moser

This volume contains the proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Termination (WST 2012), to be held February 19–23, 2012 in Obergurgl, Austria. The goal of the Workshop on Termination is to be a venue for presentation and discussion of all topics in and around termination. In this way, the workshop tries to bridge the gaps between different communities interested and active in research in and around termination. The 12th International Workshop on Termination in Obergurgl continues the successful workshops held in St. Andrews (1993), La Bresse (1995), Ede (1997), Dagstuhl (1999), Utrecht (2001), Valencia (2003), Aachen (2004), Seattle (2006), Paris (2007), Leipzig (2009), and Edinburgh (2010). The 12th International Workshop on Termination did welcome contributions on all aspects of termination and complexity analysis. Contributions from the imperative, constraint, functional, and logic programming communities, and papers investigating applications of complexity or termination (for example in program transformation or theorem proving) were particularly welcome. We did receive 18 submissions which all were accepted. Each paper was assigned two reviewers. In addition to these 18 contributed talks, WST 2012, hosts three invited talks by Alexander Krauss, Martin Hofmann, and Fausto Spoto

Cyclic abduction of inductively defined safety and termination preconditions

We introduce cyclic abduction: a new method for automatically inferring safety and termination preconditions of heap manipulating while programs, expressed as inductive definitions in separation logic. Cyclic abduction essentially works by searching for a cyclic proof of the desired property, abducing definitional clauses of the precondition as necessary in order to advance the proof search process. We provide an implementation, Caber, of our cyclic abduction method, based on a suite of heuristically guided tactics. It is often able to automatically infer preconditions describing lists, trees, cyclic and composite structures which, in other tools, previously had to be supplied by hand

Cyclic abduction of inductively defined safety and termination preconditions

We introduce cyclic abduction: a new method for automatically inferring safety and termination preconditions of heap manipulating while programs, expressed as inductive definitions in separation logic. Cyclic abduction essentially works by searching for a cyclic proof of the desired property, abducing definitional clauses of the precondition as necessary in order to advance the proof search process. We provide an implementation, Caber, of our cyclic abduction method, based on a suite of heuristically guided tactics. It is often able to automatically infer preconditions describing lists, trees, cyclic and composite structures which, in other tools, previously had to be supplied by hand