Deductive verification of object-oriented software : dynamic frames, dynamic logic and predicate abstraction

Software systems play a central role in modern society, and their correctness is often crucially important. Formal specification and verification are promising approaches for ensuring correctness more rigorously than just by testing. This work presents an approach for deductively verifying design-by-contract specifications of object-oriented programs. The approach is based on dynamic logic, and addresses the challenges of modularity and automation using dynamic frames and predicate abstraction

Abstract interpretation of symbolic execution with explicit state updates

Systems for deductive software verification model the semantics of their target programming language with full precision. On the other hand, abstraction based approaches work with approximations of the semantics in order to be fully automatic. In this paper we aim at providing a uniform framework for both fully precise and approximate reasoning about programs. We present a sound dynamic logic calculus that integrates abstraction in the sense of abstract interpretation theory. In the second part of the paper, we apply the approach to the analysis of secure information flow