Program Verification and Specification Inference

Wei-Ngan Chin

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 which can achieve both better expressiveness and better verifiability. Moreover, we shall also highlight a unified specification mechanism that can be used for both verification and inference. Our framework allows preconditions and postconditions to be selectively inferred via a set of uninterpreted relations which are computed using bi-abduction, and modularly synthesized to support concise specification for program code.