Incremental reachability checking of KernelC programs using matching logic

Abstract

A fundamental phase in software development deals with verifying that software behaves correctly. Although accurate testing can discover many wrong behaviours, formal software verification techniques can help in developing applications that dependably satisfy their requirements. However, since formal verification techniques are time consuming and software changes continuously, incremental verification methods, i.e., methods which reuse the results of the verification of a previous version when verifying a new version of a program, are very useful, since they can significantly reduce the time required to perform the verification. In this work I apply a syntactic-semantic incremental approach to reachability checking of KernelC programs using matching logic. KernelC is a significant, non-trivial subset of the C programming language. Matching logic is a language-independent proof system to reason about programs in any language that has a rewrite-based operational semantics. Incrementality is achieved by encoding the verification procedure in a syntax-driven fashion based on semantic attributes defined on top of an operator-precedence grammar.