Local Reasoning About the Presence of Bugs: Incorrectness Separation Logic

Azalea Raad, Josh Berdine, Hoang-Hai Dang, Derek Dreyer, Peter W. O'Hearn, Jules Villard

Abstract: There has been a large body of work on local reasoning for proving the absence of bugs, but none for proving their presence. We present a new formal framework for local reasoning about the presence of bugs, building on two complementary foundations: 1) separation logic and 2) incorrectness logic. We explore the theory of this new incorrectness separation logic (ISL), and use it to derive a begin-anywhere, intra-procedural symbolic execution analysis that has no false positives by construction. In so doing, we take a step towards transferring modular, scalable techniques from the world of program verification to bug catching.