Verification of Java Bytecode using Analysis and Transformation of Logic Programs

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel approach to verify Java bytecode by translating it into logic programs, enabling the use of advanced LP analysis tools to automatically prove properties like termination and resource bounds.

Contribution

It introduces a method to automatically analyze Java bytecode by partial evaluation of a logic programming interpreter, effectively decompiling bytecode into analyzable LP representations.

Findings

Successfully verified termination of Java bytecode programs.

Proved run-time error freeness using LP analysis.

Inferred resource consumption bounds for Java bytecode.

Abstract

State of the art analyzers in the Logic Programming (LP) paradigm are nowadays mature and sophisticated. They allow inferring a wide variety of global properties including termination, bounds on resource consumption, etc. The aim of this work is to automatically transfer the power of such analysis tools for LP to the analysis and verification of Java bytecode (JVML). In order to achieve our goal, we rely on well-known techniques for meta-programming and program specialization. More precisely, we propose to partially evaluate a JVML interpreter implemented in LP together with (an LP representation of) a JVML program and then analyze the residual program. Interestingly, at least for the examples we have studied, our approach produces very simple LP representations of the original JVML programs. This can be seen as a decompilation from JVML to high-level LP source. By reasoning about such residual programs, we can automatically prove in the CiaoPP system some non-trivial properties of JVML programs such as termination, run-time error freeness and infer bounds on its resource consumption. We are not aware of any other system which is able to verify such advanced properties of Java bytecode.