Beyond 2-Safety: Asymmetric Product Programs for Relational Program Verification

Relational Hoare Logic is a generalization of Hoare logic that allows reasoning about executions of two programs, or two executions of the same program. It can be used to verify that a program is robust or (information flow) secure, and that two programs are observationally equivalent. Product programs provide a means to reduce verification of relational judgments to the verification of a (standard) Hoare judgment, and open the possibility of applying standard verification tools to relational properties. However, previous notions of product programs are defined for deterministic and structured programs. Moreover, these notions are symmetric, and cannot be applied to properties such as refinement, which are asymmetric and involve universal quantification on the traces of the first program and existential quantification on the traces of the second program.

Asymmetric products generalize previous notions of products in three directions: they are based on a control-flow graph representation of programs, they are applicable to non-deterministic languages, and they are by construction asymmetric. Thanks to these characteristics, asymmetric products allow to validate abstraction/refinement relations between two programs, and to prove the correctness of advanced loop optimizations that could not be handled by our previous work. We validate their effectiveness by applying a prototype implementation to verify representative examples from translation validation and predicate abstraction.