Modularity for decidability of deductive verification with applications to distributed systems
Marcelo Taube, Giuliano Losa, Kenneth L. McMillan, Oded Padon, Mooly Sagiv, Sharon Shoham, James R. Wilcox, Doug Woos · 2018
Proof automation can substantially increase productivity in formal verification of complex systems. However, unpredictablility of automated provers in handling quantified formulas presents a major hurdle to usability of these tools. We propose to solve this problem not by improving the provers, but by using a modular proof methodology that allows us to produce decidable verification conditions. Decidability greatly improves predictability of proof automation, resulting in a more practical verification approach. We apply this methodology to develop verified implementations of distributed protocols, demonstrating its effectiveness.