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arXiv · 1508.01691

Your Proof Fails? Testing Helps to Find the Reason

Guillaume Petiot·Nikolai Kosmatov·Bernard Botella·Alain Giorgetti·Jacques Julliand
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Abstract

Applying deductive verification to formally prove that a program respects its formal specification is a very complex and time-consuming task due in particular to the lack of feedback in case of proof failures. Along with a non-compliance between the code and its specification (due to an error in at least one of them), possible reasons of a proof failure include a missing or too weak specification for a called function or a loop, and lack of time or simply incapacity of the prover to finish a particular proof. This work proposes a new methodology where test generation helps to identify the reason of a proof failure and to exhibit a counter-example clearly illustrating the issue. We describe how to transform an annotated C program into C code suitable for testing and illustrate the benefits of the method on comprehensive examples. The method has been implemented in STADY, a plugin of the software analysis platform FRAMA-C. Initial experiments show that detecting non-compliances and contract weaknesses allows to precisely diagnose most proof failures.

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Guillaume Petiot, Nikolai Kosmatov, Bernard Botella, Alain Giorgetti, Jacques Julliand. 2015-08-07. Your Proof Fails? Testing Helps to Find the Reason. https://arxiv.org/abs/1508.01691

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