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Relational Program Reasoning Using Compiler IR

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Verified Software. Theories, Tools, and Experiments (VSTTE 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 9971))

Abstract

Relational program reasoning is concerned with formally comparing pairs of executions of programs. Prominent examples of relational reasoning are program equivalence checking (which considers executions from different programs) and detecting illicit information flow (which considers two executions of the same program).

The abstract logical foundations of relational reasoning are, in the meantime, sufficiently well understood. In this paper, we address some of the challenges that remain to make the reasoning practicable. Two major ones are dealing with the feature richness of programming languages such as C and with the weakly structured control flow that many real-world programs exhibit.

A popular approach to control this complexity is to define the analyses on the level of an intermediate program representation (IR) such as one generated by modern compilers. In this paper we describe the ideas and insights behind IR-based relational verification. We present a program equivalence checker for C programs operating on LLVM IR and demonstrate its effectiveness by automatically verifying equivalence of functions from different implementations of the standard C library.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    To distinguish identifiers from the two programs, we add subscripts indicating the program to which they belong. We may also concurrently use the original identifiers without a subscript as long as the relation is clear from the context.

  2. 2.

    The situation is symmetric with the case for Q omitted here.

  3. 3.

    This restriction is of minor practical importance but releases us from the need to create coupling predicates for arbitrary combinations of synchronization points.

  4. 4.

    Alternatively, it would also be possible to trade soundness for completeness and, e.g., assume that such a call does not change the heap.

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Acknowledgments

This work was partially supported by the German National Science Foundation (DFG) under the IMPROVE APS project within the priority program SPP 1593 “Design For Future – Managed Software Evolution”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany

    Moritz Kiefer, Vladimir Klebanov & Mattias Ulbrich

Authors
  1. Moritz Kiefer
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  2. Vladimir Klebanov
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  3. Mattias Ulbrich
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mattias Ulbrich .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. IRISA, University of Rennes 1, Rennes, France

    Sandrine Blazy

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

    Marsha Chechik

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Kiefer, M., Klebanov, V., Ulbrich, M. (2016). Relational Program Reasoning Using Compiler IR. In: Blazy, S., Chechik, M. (eds) Verified Software. Theories, Tools, and Experiments. VSTTE 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9971. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48869-1_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48869-1_12

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