Verifying Procedural Programs via Constrained Rewriting Induction

TL;DR

This paper introduces a verification approach for procedural programs by transforming them into Logically Constrained Term Rewriting Systems, enabling automatic safety and correctness proofs without separate specifications.

Contribution

It extends transformation techniques to handle complex data types and global features, and adapts rewriting induction for effective verification of procedural programs.

Findings

Automatically verifies memory safety

Proves correctness of realistic functions

Verifies equivalence of program implementations

Abstract

This paper aims to develop a verification method for procedural programs via a transformation into Logically Constrained Term Rewriting Systems (LCTRSs). To this end, we extend transformation methods based on integer TRSs to handle arbitrary data types, global variables, function calls and arrays, as well as encode safety checks. Then we adapt existing rewriting induction methods to LCTRSs and propose a simple yet effective method to generalize equations. We show that we can automatically verify memory safety and prove correctness of realistic functions. Our approach proves equivalence between two implementations, so in contrast to other works, we do not require an explicit specification in a separate specification language.