Low-Level Program Verification using Matching Logic Reachability

Matching logic reachability is an emerging verification approach which uses a language-independent proof system to prove program properties based on the operational semantics. In this paper we apply this approach in the context of a low-level real-time language with interrupts, in which each instruction takes a specified time to execute. In particular, we verify that if the interrupts are scheduled with large enough intervals, the program execution terminates yielding the correct result. Surprisingly, it turns out that matching logic reachability can handle the low-level and real-time features of the language just by using their operational semantics, and that language specific reasoning is unnecessary. 1 Matching Logic Reachability In this section we give background on matching logic reachability [6–10]. The matching logic reachability approach to program verification is to directly use the operation semantics of the target language, together with an appropriate language-independent proof system, in order to prove that a program meets its specifications. Both the operational semantics and the program specifications are given as reachability rules. No axiomatic (or Hoare), dynamic, or other auxiliary semantics of the same language is needed for verification purposes, the language-independent proof system offers all the good properties of these formalisms, including small size and compositionality of proof derivations.