Developing a self-applicable verification system. Theory and practice

Abstract

Compared with traditional testing, the deductive verification represents a more formal way to establish the program correctness. However, can we be sure that the verification system itself is correct? The theoretical foundations of Hoare logic were examined in classical works, and some soundness/completeness theorems are well known. Nevertheless, we practically are not aware of implementations of those theoretical methods subjected to anything more than testing. In other words, our ultimate goal is a verification system that can be self-applicable (at least partially). In our recent studies, we applied the MetaVCG approach in order to make such a task more feasible.