Semantics-based program verifiers for all languages

One-Counter Verifiers for Decidable Languages

Condon and Lipton (FOCS 1989) showed that the class of languages having a space-bounded interactive proof system (IPS) is a proper subset of decidable languages, where the verifier is a probabilistic Turing machine. In this paper, we show that if we use architecturally restricted verifiers instead of restricting the working memory, i.e. replacing the working tape(s) with a single counter, we ca...

Towards Usable Program Verifiers

Code deficiencies and bugs constitute an unavoidable part of software systems. In safety-critical systems, like aircrafts or medical equipment, even a single bug can lead to catastrophic impacts such as injuries or death. Formal verification can be used to statically track code deficiencies by proving or disproving correctness properties of a system. However, at its current state formal verific...

Role-based Semantics for Agent Communication Languages

We consider agents having multiple communication sessions at the same time. We assume that FIPA semantics of agent communication languages can still be used when we attribute mental attitudes for each session, which we call the roles of the agents, and we assume that we have to distinguish the mental attitudes attributed to the roles from the mental attitudes of the agents. We consider several ...

Trigger Selection Strategies to Stabilize Program Verifiers

SMT-based program verifiers often suffer from the so-called butterfly effect, in which minor modifications to the program source cause significant instabilities in verification times, which in turn may lead to spurious verification failures and a degraded user experience. This paper identifies matching loops (ill-behaved quantifiers causing an SMT solver to repeatedly instantiate a small set of...

A Semantics for Program Analysis in Narrowing-Based Functional Logic Languages