We propose a novel approach to proving the termination of heapmanipulating programs, which combines separation logic with cyclic proof within a Hoare-style proof system. Judgements in this system express (guaranteed) termination of the program when started from a given line in the program and in a state satisfying a given precondition, which is expressed as a formula of separation logic. The proof rules of our system are of two types: logical rules that operate on preconditions; and symbolic execution rules that capture the effect of executing program commands.Our logical preconditions employ inductively defined predicates to describe heap properties, and proofs in our system are cyclic proofs: cyclic derivations in which some inductive predicate is unfolded infinitely often along every infinite path, thus allowing us to discard all infinite paths in the proof by an infinite descent argument. Moreover, the use of this soundness condition enables us to avoid the explicit construction and use of ranking functions for termination. We also give a completeness result for our system, which is relative in that it relies upon completeness of a proof system for logical implications in separation logic. We give examples illustrating our approach, including one example for which the corresponding ranking function is non-obvious: termination of the classical algorithm for in-place reversal of a (possibly cyclic) linked list.

Copyright and moral rights to this thesis/research project are retained by the author and/or other copyright owners. The work is supplied on the understanding that any use for commercial gain is strictly forbidden. A copy may be downloaded for personal, non-commercial, research or study without prior permission and without charge. Any use of the thesis/research project for private study or research must be properly acknowledged with reference to the work's full bibliographic details.This thesis/research project may not be reproduced in any format or medium, or extensive quotations taken from it, or its content changed in any way, without first obtaining permission in writing from the copyright holder(s).If you believe that any material held in the repository infringes copyright law, please contact the Repository Team at Middlesex University via the following email address:eprints@mdx.ac.ukThe item will be removed from the repository while any claim is being investigated. AbstractWe investigate the model checking problem for symbolic-heap separation logic with user-defined inductive predicates, i.e., the problem of checking that a given stack-heap memory state satisfies a given formula in this language, as arises e.g. in software testing or runtime verification. First, we show that the problem is decidable; specifically, we present a bottom-up fixed point algorithm that decides the problem and runs in exponential time in the size of the problem instance.Second, we show that, while model checking for the full language is EXPTIME-complete, the problem becomes NP-complete or PTIME-solvable when we impose natural syntactic restrictions on the schemata defining the inductive predicates. We additionally present NP and PTIME algorithms for these restricted fragments.Finally, we report on the experimental performance of our procedures on a variety of specifications extracted from programs, exercising multiple combinations of syntactic restrictions.

In this paper, we close the logical gap between provability in the logic BBI, which is the propositional basis for separation logic, and validity in an intended class of separation models, as employed in applications of separation logic such as program verification. An intended class of separation models is usually specified by a collection of axioms describing the specific model properties that are expected to hold, which we call a separation theory. Our main contributions are as follows. First, we show that several typical properties of separation theories are not definable in BBI. Second, we show that these properties become definable in a suitable hybrid extension of BBI, obtained by adding a theory of naming to BBI in the same way that hybrid logic extends normal modal logic. The binder-free extension HyBBI captures most of the properties we consider, and the full extension HyBBI(↓) with the usual ↓ binder of hybrid logic covers all these properties. Third, we present an axiomatic proof system for our hybrid logic whose extension with any set of "pure" axioms is sound and complete with respect to the models satisfying those axioms. As a corollary of this general result, we obtain, in a parametric manner, a sound and complete axiomatic proof system for any separation theory from our considered class. To the best of our knowledge, this class includes all separation theories appearing in the published literature.