Verification by Abstract Interpretation

Verification by Abstract Interpretation Patrick Cousot École normale supérieure, Département d'informatique 45 rue d'Ulm, 75230 Paris cedex 05, France , Dedicated to Zohar Manna, for his 26th birthday. Abstract. Abstract interpretation theory formalizes the idea of abstrac- tion of mathematical structures, in particular those involved in the spec- ification of properties and proof methods of computer systems. Verifica- tion by abstract interpretation is illustrated on the particular cases of predicate abstraction, which is revisited to handle infinitary abstractions, and on the new parametric predicate abstraction. 1 Introduction Abstract interpretation theory [7,8,9,11,13] formalizes the idea of abstraction of mathematical structures, in particular those involved in the specification of properties and proof methods of computer systems. Verification by abstract interpretation is illustrated on the particular cases of predicate abstraction [4,15,19] (where the finitary program-specific ground atomic propositional components of inductive invariants have to be provided) which is revisited (in that it is derived by systematic approximation of the con- crete semantics of a programming language using an infinitary abstraction) and on the new parametric predicate abstraction, a program-independent generaliza- tion (where parameterized infinitary predicates are automatically combined by reduction and instantiated to particular programs by approximation).

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