Modularity for decidability of deductive verification with applications to distributed systems

M Taube, G Losa, KL McMillan, O Padon… - Proceedings of the 39th …, 2018 - dl.acm.org
Proceedings of the 39th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language …, 2018dl.acm.org
Proof automation can substantially increase productivity in formal verification of complex
systems. However, unpredictablility of automated provers in handling quantified formulas
presents a major hurdle to usability of these tools. We propose to solve this problem not by
improving the provers, but by using a modular proof methodology that allows us to produce
decidable verification conditions. Decidability greatly improves predictability of proof
automation, resulting in a more practical verification approach. We apply this methodology to …
Proof automation can substantially increase productivity in formal verification of complex systems. However, unpredictablility of automated provers in handling quantified formulas presents a major hurdle to usability of these tools. We propose to solve this problem not by improving the provers, but by using a modular proof methodology that allows us to produce decidable verification conditions. Decidability greatly improves predictability of proof automation, resulting in a more practical verification approach. We apply this methodology to develop verified implementations of distributed protocols, demonstrating its effectiveness.
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