Automated Verification of Pointer Programs

We present a fully automated method for the verification of annotated recursive programs with dynamic pointer structures. Assertions are expressed in a dialect of dynamic logic extended with nominals and tailored to heap structures, in which one can express complex properties such as reachability. Verification conditions are generated using a novel calculus for computing the strongest post-condition of statements manipulating the heap, such as dynamic allocation and field-assignment. Further, we introduce a new decidable tableaux-based method to automatically check these verification conditions.

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