2015 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
Automated Program Verification
Authors : Azadeh Farzan, Matthias Heizmann, Jochen Hoenicke, Zachary Kincaid, Andreas Podelski
Published in: Language and Automata Theory and Applications
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
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A new approach to program verification is based on automata. The notion of automaton depends on the verification problem at hand (nested word automata for recursion, Büchi automata for termination, a form of data automata for parametrized programs, etc.). The approach is to first construct an automaton for the candidate proof and then check its validity via automata inclusion. The originality of the approach lies in the construction of an automaton from a correctness proof of a given sequence of statements. A sequence of statements is at the same time a word over a finite alphabet and it is (a very simple case of) a program. Just as we ask whether a word has an accepting run, we can ask whether a sequence of statements has a correctness proof (of a certain form). The automaton accepts exactly the sequences that do.