Abstract
A common way to specify software properties is to associate a contract to each function, allowing the use of various techniques to assess (e.g. to prove or to test) that the implementation is valid with respect to these contracts. However, in practice, high-level properties are not always easily expressible through function contracts. Furthermore, such properties may span across multiple functions, making the specification task tedious, and its assessment difficult and error-prone, especially on large code bases. To address these issues, we propose a new specification mechanism called meta-properties. Meta-properties are enhanced global invariants specified for a set of functions, capable of expressing predicates on values of variables as well as memory related conditions (such as separation) and read or write access constraints. This paper gives a detailed presentation of meta-properties and their support in a dedicated Frama-C plugin MetAcsl, and shows that they are automatically amenable to both deductive verification and testing. This is demonstrated by applying these techniques on two illustrative case studies.
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Notes
- 1.
This feature relies on the Frama-C plugin Callgraph, which makes gross over-approximations of these sets in the presence of indirect calls (i.e. function pointers).
- 2.
Technically, Post can only be used in assigns statements or contract post-conditions.
- 3.
The case studies and their specifications are available at https://huit.re/metatap.
- 4.
We assume a total order for simplicity, but it would also work with a partial one.
- 5.
- 6.
For example, simplification saves 8 s on the deductive verification of the correct confidentiality implementation (for a total of 24 s).
- 7.
The last row is not relevant for deductive verification, see Sect. 6.2.
- 8.
E-ACSL add checks to ensure that no runtime error (segfaults, overflow, ...) will occur and stops the program upon violation.
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Acknowledgment
This work was partially supported by the project VESSEDIA, which has received funding from the EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 731453. This work was also partially supported by ANR (grant ANR-18-CE25-0015-01). The work of the first author was partially funded by a Ph.D. grant of the French Ministry of Defense. Many thanks to the anonymous referees for their helpful comments.
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Robles, V., Kosmatov, N., Prevosto, V., Rilling, L., Le Gall, P. (2019). Tame Your Annotations with MetAcsl: Specifying, Testing and Proving High-Level Properties. In: Beyer, D., Keller, C. (eds) Tests and Proofs. TAP 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11823. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31157-5_11
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