Programs with arrays are ubiquitous. Automated reasoning about arrays necessitates discovering properties about ranges of elements at certain program points. Such properties are formally specified by universally quantified formulas, which are difficult to find, and difficult to prove inductive. In this paper, we propose an algorithm based on an enumerative search that discovers quantified invariants in stages. First, by exploiting the program syntax, it identifies ranges of elements accessed in each loop. Second, it identifies potentially useful facts about individual elements and generalizes them to hypotheses about entire ranges. Finally, by applying recent advances of SMT solving, the algorithm filters out wrong hypotheses. The combination of properties is often enough to prove that the program meets a safety specification. The algorithm has been implemented in a solver for Constrained Horn Clauses, Freq-Horn, and extended to deal with multiple (possibly nested) loops. We show that FreqHorn advances state-of-the-art on a wide range of public array-handling programs.
Evaluation of scientific contributions can be done in many different ways. For the various research communities working on the verification of systems (software, hardware, or the underlying involved mechanisms), it is important to bring together the community and to compare the state of the art, in order to identify progress of and new challenges in the research area. Competitions are a suitable way to do that. The first verification competition was created in 1992 (SAT competition), shortly followed by the CASC competition in 1996. Since the year 2000, the number of dedicated verification competitions is steadily increasing. Many of these events now happen regularly, gathering researchers that would like to understand how well their research prototypes work in practice. Scientific results have to be reproducible, and powerful computers are becoming cheaper and cheaper, thus, these competitions are becoming an important means for advancing research in verification technology. TOOLympics 2019 is an event to celebrate the achievements of the various competitions, and to understand their commonalities and differences. This volume is dedicated to the presentation of the 16 competitions that joined TOOLympics as part of the celebration of the 25 th anniversary of the TACAS conference.
Simultaneous occurrences of multiple recurrence relations in a system of non-linear constrained Horn clauses are crucial for proving its satisfiability. A solution of such system is often inexpressible in the constraint language. We propose to synchronize recurrent computations, thus increasing the chances for a solution to be found. We introduce a notion of CHC product allowing to formulate a lightweight iterative algorithm of merging recurrent computations into groups and prove its soundness. The evaluation over a set of systems handling lists and linear integer arithmetic confirms that the transformed systems are drastically more simple to solve than the original ones.
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