Journal article

 
Habermehl, P., Holík, L., Rogalewicz, A., Šimáček, J., Vojnar, T.: Forest Automata for Verification of Heap Manipulation, In: Formal Methods in System Design, Vol. 2012, No. 41, Berlin, DE, p. 83-106, ISSN 0925-9856
Publication language:english
Original title:Forest Automata for Verification of Heap Manipulation
Title (cs):Automaty nad lesy pro verifikaci programů s dynamickými datovými strukturami
Pages:83-106
Place:DE
Year:2012
URL:http://www.springerlink.com/content/p14x123477v1r722/
Journal:Formal Methods in System Design, Vol. 2012, No. 41, Berlin, DE
ISSN:0925-9856
Keywords
shape analysis, dynamic linked data structures, tree automata, trees, linked lists, formal verification, abstract regular model checking
Annotation
We consider verification of programs manipulating dynamic linked data structures such as various forms of singly and doubly-linked lists or trees. We consider important properties for this kind of systems like no null-pointer dereferences, absence of garbage, shape properties, etc. We develop a verification method based on a novel use of tree automata to represent heap configurations. A heap is split into several "separated" parts such that each of them can be represented by a tree automaton. The automata can refer to each other allowing the different parts of the heaps to mutually refer to their boundaries. Moreover, we allow for a hierarchical representation of heaps by allowing alphabets of the tree automata to contain other, nested tree automata. Program instructions can be easily encoded as operations on our representation structure. This allows verification of programs based on a symbolic state-space exploration together with refinable abstraction within the so-called abstract regular tree model checking. A motivation for the approach is to combine advantages of automata-based approaches (higher generality and flexibility of the abstraction) with some advantages of separation-logic-based approaches (efficiency). We have implemented our approach and tested it successfully on multiple non-trivial case studies.
BibTeX:
@ARTICLE{
   author = {Peter Habermehl and Lukáš Holík and Adam Rogalewicz and Jiří
	Šimáček and Tomáš Vojnar},
   title = {Forest Automata for Verification of Heap Manipulation},
   pages = {83--106},
   journal = {Formal Methods in System Design},
   volume = {2012},
   number = {41},
   year = {2012},
   ISSN = {0925-9856},
   language = {english},
   url = {http://www.fit.vutbr.cz/research/view_pub.php?id=10013}
}