Temporal prophecy for proving temporal properties of infinite-state systems

Various verification techniques for temporal properties transform temporal verification to safety verification. For infinite-state systems, these transformations are inherently imprecise. That is, for some instances, the temporal property holds, but the resulting safety property does not. This paper introduces a mechanism for tackling this imprecision. This mechanism, which we call temporal prophecy, is inspired by prophecy variables. Temporal prophecy refines an infinite-state system using first-order linear temporal logic formulas, via a suitable tableau construction. For a specific liveness-to-safety transformation based on first-order logic, we show that using temporal prophecy strictly increases the precision. Furthermore, temporal prophecy leads to robustness of the proof method, which is manifested by a cut elimination theorem. We integrate our approach into the Ivy deductive verification system, and show that it can handle challenging temporal verification examples.

Model Completeness, Uniform Interpolants and Superposition Calculus

Uniform interpolants have been largely studied in non-classical propositional logics since the nineties; a successive research line within the automated reasoning community investigated uniform quantifier-free interpolants (sometimes referred to as “covers”) in first-order theories. This further research line is motivated by the fact that uniform interpolants offer an effective solution to tackle quantifier elimination and symbol elimination problems, which are central in model checking infinite state systems. This was first pointed out in ESOP 2008 by Gulwani and Musuvathi, and then by the authors of the present contribution in the context of recent applications to the verification of data-aware processes. In this paper, we show how covers are strictly related to model completions, a well-known topic in model theory. We also investigate the computation of covers within the Superposition Calculus, by adopting a constrained version of the calculus and by defining appropriate settings and reduction strategies. In addition, we show that computing covers is computationally tractable for the fragment of the language used when tackling the verification of data-aware processes. This observation is confirmed by analyzing the preliminary results obtained using the mcmt tool to verify relevant examples of data-aware processes. These examples can be found in the last version of the tool distribution.

Counterexample-Guided Prophecy for Model Checking Modulo the Theory of Arrays

We develop a framework for model checking infinite-state systems by automatically augmenting them with auxiliary variables, enabling quantifier-free induction proofs for systems that would otherwise require quantified invariants. We combine this mechanism with a counterexample-guided abstraction refinement scheme for the theory of arrays. Our framework can thus, in many cases, reduce inductive reasoning with quantifiers and arrays to quantifier-free and array-free reasoning. We evaluate the approach on a wide set of benchmarks from the literature. The results show that our implementation often outperforms state-of-the-art tools, demonstrating its practical potential.

Sound Verification Procedures for Temporal Properties of Infinite-State Systems

First-Order Linear Temporal Logic (FOLTL) is particularly convenient to specify distributed systems, in particular because of the unbounded aspect of their state space. We have recently exhibited novel decidable fragments of FOLTL which pave the way for tractable verification. However, these fragments are not expressive enough for realistic specifications. In this paper, we propose three transformations to translate a typical FOLTL specification into two of its decidable fragments. All three transformations are proved sound (the associated propositions are proved in Coq) and have a high degree of automation. To put these techniques into practice, we propose a specification language relying on FOLTL, as well as a prototype which performs the verification, relying on existing model checkers. This approach allows us to successfully verify safety and liveness properties for various specifications of distributed systems from the literature.

SMT-based verification of data-aware processes: a model-theoretic approach

In recent times, satisfiability modulo theories (SMT) techniques gained increasing attention and obtained remarkable success in model-checking infinite-state systems. Still, we believe that whenever more expressivity is needed in order to specify the systems to be verified, more and more support is needed from mathematical logic and model theory. This is the case of the applications considered in this paper: we study verification over a general model of relational, data-aware processes, to assess (parameterized) safety properties irrespectively of the initial database (DB) instance. Toward this goal, we take inspiration from array-based systems and tackle safety algorithmically via backward reachability. To enable the adoption of this technique in our rich setting, we make use of the model-theoretic machinery of model completion, which surprisingly turns out to be an effective tool for verification of relational systems and represents the main original contribution of this paper. In this way, we pursue a twofold purpose. On the one hand, we isolate three notable classes for which backward reachability terminates, in turn witnessing decidability. Two of such classes relate our approach to conditions singled out in the literature, whereas the third one is genuinely novel. On the other hand, we are able to exploit SMT technology in implementations, building on the well-known MCMT (Model Checker Modulo Theories) model checker for array-based systems and extending it to make all our foundational results fully operational. All in all, the present contribution is deeply rooted in the long-standing tradition of the application of model theory in computer science. In particular, this paper applies these ideas in an original mathematical context and shows how these techniques can be used for the first time to empower algorithmic techniques for the verification of infinite-state systems based on arrays, so as to make such techniques applicable to the timely, challenging settings of data-aware processes.