Cartesian Reachability Logic: A Language-parametric Logic for Verifying k-Safety Properties
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Article in Proceedings |
| Conference | Proceedings of 24th International Conference on Logic for Programming, Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| web | https://easychair.org/publications/paper/8vTf |
| Doi | http://dx.doi.org/10.29007/1874 |
| Keywords | hyperproperties; k-safety; language-parametric; logic |
| Attached files | |
| Description | We introduce a language-parametric calculus for k-safety verification - Cartesian Reachability logic (CRL). In recent years, formal verification of hyperproperties has become an important topic in the formal methods community. An interesting class of hyperproperties is known as k-safety properties, which express the absence of a bad k-tuple of execution traces. Many security policies, such as noninterference, and functional properties, such as commutativity, monotonicity, and transitivity, are k-safety properties. A prominent example of a logic that can reason about k-safety properties of software systems is Cartesian Hoare logic (CHL). However, CHL targets a specific, small imperative language. In order to use it for sound verification of programs in a different language, one needs to extend it with the desired features or hand-craft a translation. Both these approaches require a lot of tedious, error-prone work. Unlike CHL, CRL is language-parametric: it can be instantiated with an operational semantics (of a certain kind) of any deterministic language. Its soundness theorem is proved once and for all, with no need to adapt or re-prove it for different languages or their variants. This approach can significantly reduce the development costs of tools and techniques for sound k-safety verification of programs in deterministic languages: for example, of smart contracts written for EVM (the language powering the Ethereum blockchain), which already has an operational semantics serving as a reference. |
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