Satisfiability modulo heap-based programs

• Main Authors: LE, Quang Loc, SUN, Jun, CHIN, Wei-Ngan
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2016
• Subjects: Decision procedures; Satisfiability; Separation logic; Inductive predicates; Cyclic proofs; Programming Languages and Compilers; Software Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/4937; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/5940/viewcontent/Satisfiability.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

In this work, we present a semi-decision procedure for a fragment of separation logic with user-defined predicates and Presburger arithmetic. To check the satisfiability of a formula, our procedure iteratively unfolds the formula and examines the derived disjuncts. In each iteration, it searches for a proof of either satisfiability or unsatisfiability. Our procedure is further enhanced with automatically inferred invariants as well as detection of cyclic proof. We also identify a syntactically restricted fragment of the logic for which our procedure is terminating and thus complete. This decidable fragment is relatively expressive as it can capture a range of sophisticated data structures with non-trivial pure properties, such as size, sortedness and near-balanced. We have implemented the proposed solver and a new system for verifying heap-based programs. We have evaluated our system on benchmark programs from a software verification competition.