Harnessing Forest Automata for Verification of Heap Manipulating Programs. (Vérification de programmes avec structures de données complexes)

This work addresses verification of infinite-state systems, more specifically, verification of programs manipulating complex dynamic linked data structures. Many different approaches emerged to date, but none of them provides a sufficiently robust solution which would succeed in all possible scenarios appearing in practice. Therefore, in this work, we propose a new approach which aims at improving the current state of the art in several dimensions. Our approach is based on using tree automata, but it is also partially inspired by some ideas taken from the methods based on separation logic. Apart from that, we also present multiple advancements within the implementation of various tree automata operations, crucial for our verification method to succeed in practice. Namely, we provide an optimised algorithm for computing simulations over labelled transition systems which then translates into more efficient computation of simulations over tree automata. We also give a new algorithm for checking inclusion over tree automata, and we provide experimental evaluation demonstrating that the new algorithm outperforms other existing approaches.