Publication detail

Forest Automata for Verification of Heap Manipulation

HOLÍK, L. ROGALEWICZ, A. ŠIMÁČEK, J. VOJNAR, T. HABERMEHL, P.

Original Title

Forest Automata for Verification of Heap Manipulation

Type

journal article - other

Language

English

Original Abstract

We consider verification of programs manipulating dynamic linked data structures such as various forms of singly and doubly-linked lists or trees. We consider important properties for this kind of systems like no null-pointer dereferences, absence of garbage, shape properties, etc. We develop a verification method based on a novel use of tree automata to represent heap configurations. A heap is split into several "separated" parts such that each of them can be represented by a tree automaton. The automata can refer to each other allowing the different parts of the heaps to mutually refer to their boundaries. Moreover, we allow for a hierarchical representation of heaps by allowing alphabets of the tree automata to contain other, nested tree automata. Program instructions can be easily encoded as operations on our representation structure. This allows verification of programs based on a symbolic state-space exploration together with refinable abstraction within the so-called abstract regular tree model checking. A motivation for the approach is to combine advantages of automata-based approaches (higher generality and flexibility of the abstraction) with some advantages of separation-logic-based approaches (efficiency). We have implemented our approach and tested it successfully on multiple non-trivial case studies.

Keywords

shape analysis, dynamic linked data structures, tree automata, trees, linked lists, formal verification, abstract regular model checking

Authors

HOLÍK, L.; ROGALEWICZ, A.; ŠIMÁČEK, J.; VOJNAR, T.; HABERMEHL, P.

RIV year

2012

Released

30. 6. 2012

ISBN

0925-9856

Periodical

FORMAL METHODS IN SYSTEM DESIGN

Year of study

2012

Number

41

State

United States of America

Pages from

83

Pages to

106

Pages count

24

URL

http://www.springerlink.com/content/p14x123477v1r722/

BibTex

@article{BUT96963,
  author="Lukáš {Holík} and Adam {Rogalewicz} and Jiří {Šimáček} and Tomáš {Vojnar} and Peter {Habermehl}",
  title="Forest Automata for Verification of Heap Manipulation",
  journal="FORMAL METHODS IN SYSTEM DESIGN",
  year="2012",
  volume="2012",
  number="41",
  pages="83--106",
  doi="10.1007/s10703-012-0150-8",
  issn="0925-9856",
  url="http://www.springerlink.com/content/p14x123477v1r722/"
}