Proving or Disproving likely Invariants with Constraint Reasoning

A program invariant is a property that holds for every execution of the program. Recent work suggest to infer likely-only invariants, via dynamic analysis. A likely invariant is a property that holds for some executions but is not guaranteed to hold for all executions. In this paper, we present work in progress addressing the challenging problem of automatically verifying that likely invariants are actual invariants. We propose a constraint-based reasoning approach that is able, unlike other approaches, to both prove or disprove likely invariants. In the latter case, our approach provides counter-examples. We illustrate the approach on a motivating example where automatically generated likely invariants are verified.Comment: In A. Serebrenik and S. Munoz-Hernandez (editors), Proceedings of the 15th Workshop on Logic-based methods in Programming Environments October 2005, Sitges. cs.PL/050807

Proving or disproving likely invariants with constraint reasoning,” Arxiv preprint cs/0508108

Abstract A program invariant is a property that holds for every execution of the program. Recent work suggest to infer likely-only invariants, via dynamic analysis. A likely invariant is a property that holds for some executions but is not guaranteed to hold for all executions. In this paper, we present work in progress addressing the challenging problem of automatically verifying that likely invariants are actual invariants. We propose a constraint-based reasoning approach that is able, unlike other approaches, to both prove or disprove likely invariants. In the latter case, our approach provides counter-examples. We illustrate the approach on a motivating example where automatically generated likely invariants are verified.