Proving that programs eventually do something good

In recent years we have seen great progress made in the area of automatic source-level static analysis tools. However, most of today's program verification tools are limited to properties that guarantee the absence of bad events (safety properties). Until now no formal software analysis tool has provided fully automatic support for proving properties that ensure that good events eventually happen (liveness properties). In this paper we present such a tool, which handles liveness properties of large systems written in C. Liveness properties are described in an extension of the specification language used in the SDV system. We have used the tool to automatically prove critical liveness properties of Windows device drivers and found several previously unknown liveness bugs. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.2.4 [Software Engineering]: Software/Program Verification; F.3.1 [Logics and Meanings of Programs]: Specifying and Verifying and Reasoning about Programs General Terms Verific...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: POPL
• Authors: Byron Cook, Alexey Gotsman, Andreas Podelski, Andrey Rybalchenko, Moshe Y. Vardi
• Keywords: Liveness Properties, POPL 2007, Programming Languages, Source-level Static Analysis, Windows Device Drivers