Selene: Pioneering Automated Proof in Software Verification
Lichen Zhang, Shuai Lu, Nan Duan · 2024
Ensuring correctness is a pivotal aspect of software engineering.Among various strategies available, software verification offers a definitive assurance of correctness.Nevertheless, writing verification proofs is resource-intensive and manpower-consuming, and there is a great need to automate this process.We introduce Selene in this paper, which is the first projectlevel automated proof benchmark constructed based on the real-world industrial-level operating system microkernel, seL4.Selene provides a comprehensive framework for end-toend proof generation and a lightweight verification environment.Our experimental results with advanced large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-3.5-turboand GPT-4, highlight the capabilities of LLMs in the domain of automated proof generation.Additionally, our further proposed augmentations indicate that the challenges presented by Selene can be mitigated in future research endeavors."Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence." -Dahl et al.'s (1972)