From Verification to Specification Inference

Abstract

Traditionally, the focus of specification mechanism has been on improving its ability to cover a wider range of problems more accurately, while the effectiveness of verification is left to the underlying theorem provers. Our work attempts a novel approach, where the focus is on designing good specification mechanisms to achieve better expressivity (the specification should capture more accurately and concisely the functionality of the corresponding code) and better verifiability (the verification process should succeed in more scenarios than the corresponding verification without the specification enhancements, with better or similar performance). Moreover, we are also interested in providing the necessary tools to assist the user with the important but tedious task of constructing desired specifications. Existing approaches to specification construction tend to be either fully manual or fully automatic. We propose a new framework for specification construction that can be done selectively and incrementally. This framework allows preconditions and postconditions to be selectively inferred via a set of specified variables, that included synthesis for unknown functions and relations.