Automatic Inference of Frame Axioms Using Static Analysis

  • Authors:

  • Z. Rakamaric;A. J. Hu

  • Affiliations:

  • Dept. of Comput. Sci., Univ. of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC;Dept. of Comput. Sci., Univ. of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC

  • Venue:
  • ASE '08 Proceedings of the 2008 23rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Many approaches to software verification are currently semi-automatic: a human must provide key logical insights - e.g., loop invariants, class invariants, and frame axioms that limit the scope of changes that must be analyzed. This paper describes a technique for automatically inferring frame axioms of procedures and loops using static analysis. The technique builds on a pointer analysis that generates limited information about all data structures in the heap. Our technique uses that information to over-approximate a potentially unbounded set of memory locations modified by each procedure/loop; this over- approximation is a candidate frame axiom. We have tested this approach on the buffer-overflow benchmarks from ASE 2007. With manually provided specifications and invariants/axioms, our tool could verify/falsify 226 of the 289 benchmarks. With our automatically inferred frame axioms, the tool could verify/falsify 203 of the 289, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.