Automatically Discovering Temporal Properties for Program Verification

This paper reports on our experience using a dynamic analysis tool, Terracotta, to automatically infer temporal properties, and a model checker, Java PathFinder, to check the inferred properties. To our best knowledge, this is the first experiment using a model checker to check automatically inferred properties. We introduce two key ideas to make our approach effective. First, we develop techniques for handling context information in a program’s execution traces so that some interesting properties can be discovered. Second, we infer properties in a single threaded environment and to check them in a multi-threaded one. We evaluate our approach on a prototype implementation of a UNIX-like file system, Daisy. Our techniques revealed a bug in Daisy and identified several interesting and subtle temporal behaviors.