VERDICT: Multi-Agent Parallel Modular Verification

Abstract

Deductive verification scales to large software systems through modular reasoning, where formal contracts summarize the behavior of individual functions and enable their independent verification. Its central bottleneck is specification synthesis: constructing the contracts required for modular verification. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled automated specification synthesis at unprecedented scale. However, existing approaches remain fundamentally bottom-up, requiring callees to be verified before their callers. This dependency limits parallelism and provides no principled mechanism for resolving interprocedural inconsistencies that propagate across call chains. We present VERDICT, a multi-agent framework for parallelizing modular deductive verification of large-scale programs. VERDICT is built on two key principles. First, assumption-based parallel specification synthesis assigns an agent to each function and allows it to proceed immediately using assumed contracts for its callees, enabling verification to proceed in parallel across the program. Second, bidirectional interprocedural conflict reconciliation resolves the inconsistencies introduced by these assumptions: when a synthesized contract contradicts an assumption, agents propagate the necessary revisions both up and down the call graph until the contracts converge. Experimental results on real-world C programs show that VERDICT synthesizes higher-quality specifications than existing approaches while substantially reducing verification time. In particular, VERDICT is the first approach that scales to the complete 20,000-line X.509 parser, ruling out nearly all the potential runtime errors within hours, whereas prior tools like PREGUSS fall far short even after days of execution.