Program verification -- 096229

1. Program verification -- 096229 Ofer Strichman Room 412 ofers@ie.technion.ac.il Office hours: after class

2. Agenda for the first class • Up to slide 36: what is this course about ? • Slide 37: why not take this course • Slide 38-39: why take this course • Slide 40: requirements

3. The goal – reliable software systems • Importance of reliable software – almost needless to mention. • A nice collection of famous bugs:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_bugs

4. The goal – reliable software systems • Here are some famous ones: • ESA Ariane 5 Flight 501 self-destruction 40 seconds after takeoff (June 4, 1996). • A conversion from 64-bit floating point to 16 bit integer with a value larger than possible with Arian 4. The overflow caused a hardware trap. • The 2003 North America blackout was triggered by a local outage that went undetetected. • A race condition in General Electric’s monitoring software prevented an alarm.

5. The goal – reliable software systems • Here are some famous ones: • The MIM-104 Patriot bug, which resulted in the deaths of 28 Americans in Dharan, Saudi Arabia (February 25, 1991). • The radar classifies detections according to a trajectory model it builds in real time. (“in x mSec the missile should be in position y”) • Due to rounding of the clock values, it accumulates inaccuracies. After several hours this inaccuracy is critical. • The Pentium bug • Incorrect floating-point division. • Cost Intel ~ $400,000,000

6. The goal – reliable software systems • Not unusual to have more than 50% of resources allocated to testing • Testing and verification are (becoming) the bottleneck of development

7. Remarks by Bill Gates17th Annual ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Seattle, Washington, November 8, 2002 “… When you look at a big commercial software company like Microsoft, there's actually as much testing that goes in as development. We have as many testers as we have developers. Testers basically test all the time, and developers basically are involved in the testing process about half the time…

8. Remarks by Bill Gates17th Annual ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Seattle, Washington, November 8, 2002 • “… We've probably changed the industry we're in. We're not in the software industry; we're in the testing industry, and writing the software is the thing that keeps us busy doing all that testing.” • “…The test cases are unbelievably expensive; in fact, there's more lines of code in the test harness than there is in the program itself. Often that's a ratio of about three to one.”

9. The goal – reliable software systems • Quality dilemma: quality / features / time • More efficient methods for test and verification are always needed • No ‘silver-bullet’ when it comes to testing. • Formal verification is on the rise...

10. Formal methods • Formal = based on rigorous mathematical logic concepts. • It is ‘machine-readable’, and hence can be used by a verification algorithm. • Once we formally specify what we expect from the program, we can try to prove that the program satisfies the specification.

11. Specification can be: Informal, textual, visual... • Local assertions: at this point in the program always x > y. • How is it different than writing ‘assert ( x > y);’ ? • A more global property: The array bound is never exceeded • Temporal properties:If a request is sent, acknowledgement is eventually received

12. ... or it can be formal (1· x · 5Ux=7)ÆG(x¸ 0) (Translated from: The value of x will be between 1 and 5, until at some point it will become 7, and it will always (“Globally”) be positive.) x=7 1· x · 5 x¸ 0

13. A system can be general and messy... struct node *copy_node(struct node *f) { staticint count = 0; struct node *temp; count ++; if (f == NULL) return NULL; if ((temp = (struct node *) malloc (sizeof (struct node))) == NULL) fprintf(stderr,"Out of memory"); temp -> tag = f -> tag; temp -> name = strdup(f -> name); temp -> left = copy_node(f -> left); temp -> right = copy_node(f -> right); temp -> cnf_id = f -> cnf_id; return temp; }

14. ... or its underlying algorithm can be modeled • E.g., as a finite-state machine release s1 s2 s3 pull release malfunction extended

15. The program can be tested... • Try inputs • x1 = 2, x2 = 25, str = ‘llk’ • x1 = 0, x2 = 31, str = ‘aaa’ • ... • ... As good as the set of input test-cases • ... and as good as the reference system • Manual inspection • Regression testing • Specification-based testing • For simple, non-critical code, this is the easiest and most immediate option.

16. ...or can be formally verified release s1 s2 s3 pull release malfunction extended • Given the formal specificationG(:malfunction) // always not malfunctioning • And the system model • Run a model-checker program to formally verify that the system satisfies the specification.

17. Remarks by Bill Gates17th Annual ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Seattle, Washington, November 8, 2002 • “We also went back and say, OK, what is the state-of-the-art in terms of being able to prove programs, prove that a program behaves in a certain way? This is the kind of problem that has been out there for many decades... • ...When I dropped out of Harvard, this was an interesting problem that was being worked on, and actually at the time I thought, well, if I go and start a company it will be too bad, I'll miss some of the big breakthroughs in proving software programs because I'll be off writing payroll checks. “

18. Remarks by Bill Gates17th Annual ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Seattle, Washington, November 8, 2002 • ...and it turns out I didn't miss all that much in terms of rapid progress which now has become, I'd say, in a sense, a very urgent problem. And although a full general solution to that is in some ways unachievable, for many very interesting properties this idea of proof has come a long way in helping us quite substantially just in the last year. • We call the system that does this kind of proof -- a model-checking system.

19. Model-checking • Input: • A finite state machine M • A temporal property PP • Output: Does M satisfy P ? 00 10 01 P = “never in state 11” 11 M

20. Model-checking M = inputs outputs • Nondeterminism is used to model systems with inputs • Model-checking is exponential in the number of inputs 00 10 01 11 M

21. Model-checking 11 P Never“11” • The model M defines a set ofbehaviors(traces)L(M) • The model P defines a set ofallowed behaviorsL(P) 00 10 01 11 M

22. Model-checking as language-inclusion • The model checking problem:L(M) µL(P) • Q: What if this problem is too hard in practice? ? error L(P) L(M)

23. Program verification • Bill: Prove that the program is correct ! • MS-employee: let me quote Carl Popper’s answer about verification vs. falsification in science. • Science does not progress by finding eternal truths... • ... only by refuting previous theories.

24. Program verification • Bill: Ok,So just prove that the program satisfies the specification ! • MS-employee : • ok ... but even if I prove that the system satisfies the specification, there can still be an error in the proof process or the proof tool that I use... • ... and there is no guarantee that the specification fully specifies what we consider as ‘correct’.

25. Program verification • Bill: Ok, fine, so just increase the probability that the program is correct ! • MS-employee : • Well, boss, if you want this process to be automatic, please provide me • a model of the program, and • a formal (machine-readable) specification... • ... Such that checking the model with respect to the specification is a decidable problem.

26. Program verification • Bill: Will it be better than testing ? • MS-employee:when it is possible, it is much better.

27. Testing / Formal Verification A very crude dichotomy: In practice: Many types of testing, Many types of formal verification.

28. Testing / Formal Verification A very crude dichotomy: In practice: Many types of testing, Many types of formal verification.

29. Testing + formal-verification • Bill: is there a mid-way ? • MS-employee: Yes: Specify formally, verify informally This is called run-time verification... • The idea is to write a small program that monitors the tested program • It checks during run-time that the tested program satisfies a given (Formal) specification.

30. Where do we start ? • Bill: ok, where do we start ? • MS-employee: with some basics of Logics • Bill: Why Logic ? • MS-employee: I will show you an example.

31. Reminder: some Boolean connectives • Æ and • Ç or • : not • ! implies • $ equal A propositional formula: :(a Ç (b ! (c Æ: a)))

32. Program transformation if(!a && !b) h(); else if(!a) g(); else f(); if(a) f(); else if(b) g(); else h(); + if(!a) { if(!b) h(); else g(); } else f(); if(a) f(); else { if(!b) h(); else g(); } ) * How can we check that these two versions are equivalent?

33. Code transformation example – cont’d • Represent procedures as independent Boolean variables original := optimized := if :a Æ b then h if a then f else if :a then g else if b then g else f else h • Transform if-then-else chains into Boolean formulas transform(if x then y else z) ≡ (x Æ y) Ç (:x Æ z) • Check equivalence of boolean formulae transform(original) , transform(optimized)

34. Code transformation example – cont’d original ≡if :a Æ :b then h else if :a then g else h ≡(:a Æ :b) Æ h Ç:(:a Æ :b) Æ if :a then g else f ≡(:a Æ :b) Æ h Ç:(:a Æ :b) Æ (:a Æ g Ça Æ f ) optimized ≡if a then f else if b then g else h ≡(a Æ f )Ç(:a Æ if b then g else h ) ≡(a Æ f )Ç(:a Æ (b Æ g Ç:bÆ h) ) Verification Condition : ((:a Æ :b) Æ h Ç:(:a Æ :b) Æ (:a Æ g Ça Æ f )) $ (a Æ f )Ç(:a Æ (b Æ g Ç:b Æ h)) The question: is valid ?

35. Not just software... Prove the equivalence of two circuits: Ç Ç Æ Æ Ç

36. So... • We will learn: • A brief introduction to Propositional Logic • Incl. General logic jargon such as: validity, satisfiability, soundness, completeness,... • In a later stage in the course we will also learn algorithms for checking whether a given formula is valid/satisfiable • Temporal Logic, and its ability to formally specify systems

37. So... • ... and • Specification-based testing (specifically: Run-time verification) • Other types of testing • ... And also • Modeling of systems • Formal verification of systems against formal specification with model-checking. • More... if we have the time

38. Why not take this course • In the end of the course you will NOT be able to automatically verify the big software you wrote in C • No one can, (completely) automatically. • After your Ph.D, you might be able to do it with some manual guidance. • On the bright side ... with certain restrictions, or compromises on what it means to ‘verify’, you might be able to verify even large C programs.

39. Why take this course • There are some restricted type of programs that can be verified automatically. • Finite-state programs (e.g. protocols) and more. • The ‘killer-application’: hardware circuits. • There is an industry behind it, incl. in Haifa. • Developers of verification tools: IBM, Intel. • Users of such tools: IBM, Intel, Melanox, Freescale, Verisity (now Cadence), Galileo (now Marvel)... • Background in hardware is not necessary at all. • Most developers & users in this field do not have it.

40. Why take this course (cont’d) • Very different than other courses you took... • Combines • Theory (logic, automata-theory) • Algorithms • Acquaintance with type of programs and systems you have probably not seen before. • Not difficult... • Only assumes ‘mathematical maturity’, not specific knowledge.

41. Requirements • ~5 homework assignments • 2 exams, 3-questions each (1.5 hours).