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Automatic Inference of Necessary Preconditions

  • Conference paper
Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation (VMCAI 2013)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 7737))

Abstract

We consider the problem of automatic precondition inference. We argue that the common notion of sufficient precondition inference (i.e., under which precondition is the program correct?) imposes too large a burden on callers, and hence it is unfit for automatic program analysis. Therefore, we define the problem of necessary precondition inference (i.e., under which precondition, if violated, will the program always be incorrect?). We designed and implemented several new abstract interpretation-based analyses to infer atomic, disjunctive, universally and existentially quantified necessary preconditions.

We experimentally validated the analyses on large scale industrial code. For unannotated code, the inference algorithms find necessary preconditions for almost 64% of methods which contained warnings. In 27% of these cases the inferred preconditions were also sufficient, meaning all warnings within the method body disappeared. For annotated code, the inference algorithms find necessary preconditions for over 68% of methods with warnings. In almost 50% of these cases the preconditions were also sufficient. Overall, the precision improvement obtained by precondition inference (counted as the additional number of methods with no warnings) ranged between 9% and 21%.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. NYU, ENS, CNRS, INRIA, France

    Patrick Cousot

  2. CNRS, ENS, INRIA, France

    Radhia Cousot

  3. Microsoft Research, USA

    Manuel Fähndrich & Francesco Logozzo

Authors
  1. Patrick Cousot
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  2. Radhia Cousot
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  3. Manuel Fähndrich
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  4. Francesco Logozzo
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Verona, Strada Le Grazie 15, 37134, Verona, Italy

    Roberto Giacobazzi  & Isabella Mastroeni  & 

  2. Microsoft Research, 7 JJ Thomason Avenue, CB3 0FB, Cambridge, UK

    Josh Berdine

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Cousot, P., Cousot, R., Fähndrich, M., Logozzo, F. (2013). Automatic Inference of Necessary Preconditions. In: Giacobazzi, R., Berdine, J., Mastroeni, I. (eds) Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation. VMCAI 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7737. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35873-9_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35873-9_10

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-35872-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-35873-9

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