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Hoare-Style Logic for Unstructured Programs

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Software Engineering and Formal Methods (SEFM 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 12310))

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Abstract

Enabling Hoare-style reasoning for low-level code is attractive since it opens the way to regain structure and modularity in a domain where structure is essentially absent. The field, however, has not yet arrived at a fully satisfactory solution, in the sense of avoiding restrictions on control flow (important for compiler optimization), controlling access to intermediate program points (important for modularity), and supporting total correctness. Proposals in the literature support some of these properties, but a solution that meets them all is yet to be found. We introduce the novel Hoare-style program logic \(\mathcal {L}_A\), which interprets postconditions relative to program points when these are first encountered. The logic can support both partial and total correctness, derive contracts for arbitrary control flow, and allows one to freely choose decomposition strategy during verification while avoiding step-indexed approximations and global invariants. The logic can be instantiated for a variety of concrete instruction set architectures and intermediate languages. The rules of \(\mathcal {L}_A\) have been verified in the interactive theorem prover HOL4 and integrated with the toolbox HolBA for semi-automated program verification, making it applicable to the ARMv6 and ARMv8 instruction sets.

This work has been supported by the TrustFull project financed by the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research and the KTH CERCES Center for Resilient Critical Infrastructures financed by the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The HolBA Github repository is located at https://github.com/kth-step/HolBA and our \(\mathcal {L}_A\) implementation for this paper is available at the commit tagged SEFM2020 in the directory src/theory/abstract_hoare_logic.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Lindstedtsvägen 5, 100 44, Stockholm, Sweden

    Didrik Lundberg, Roberto Guanciale, Andreas Lindner & Mads Dam

  2. Saab AB, Nettovägen 6, 175 41, Järfälla, Sweden

    Didrik Lundberg

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  1. Didrik Lundberg
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  2. Roberto Guanciale
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  3. Andreas Lindner
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  1. Informatica, Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI), Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Frank de Boer

  2. Department of Computer Science, Nazarbayev University, Astana, Kazakhstan

    Antonio Cerone

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Lundberg, D., Guanciale, R., Lindner, A., Dam, M. (2020). Hoare-Style Logic for Unstructured Programs. In: de Boer, F., Cerone, A. (eds) Software Engineering and Formal Methods. SEFM 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12310. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58768-0_11

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