SPLASH 2021
Sun 17 - Fri 22 October 2021 Chicago, Illinois, United States
Fri 22 Oct 2021 14:05 - 14:20 at Zurich D - Types & Verification Chair(s): Leonidas Lampropoulos
Fri 22 Oct 2021 22:05 - 22:20 at Zurich D - Types & Verification -- mirror Chair(s): Atsushi Igarashi

Verifying imperative programs is hard. A key difficulty is that the specification of what an imperative program does is often intertwined with details about pointers and imperative state. Although there are a number of powerful separation logics that allow the details of imperative state to be captured and managed, these details are complicated and reasoning about them requires significant time and expertise. In this paper, we take a different approach: a memory-safe type system that, as part of type-checking, extracts functional specifications from imperative programs. This disentangles imperative state, which is handled by the type system, from functional specifications, which can be verified without reference to pointers. A key difficulty is that sometimes memory safety depends crucially on the functional specification of a program; e.g., an array index is only memory-safe if the index is in bounds. To handle this case, our specification extraction inserts dynamic checks into the specification. Verification then requires the additional proof that none of these checks fail. However, these checks are in a purely functional language, and so this proof also requires no reasoning about pointers.

Fri 22 Oct

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