Unified Reasoning about Robustness Properties of Symbolic-Heap Separation Logic

Abstract: We introduce heap automata, a formalism for automatic reasoning about robustness properties of the symbolic heap fragment of separation logic with user-defined inductive predicates. Robustness properties, such as satisfiability, reachability, and acyclicity, are important for a wide range of reasoning tasks in automated program analysis and verification based on separation logic. Previously, such properties have appeared in many places in the separation logic literature, but have not been studied in a systematic manner. In this paper, we develop an algorithmic framework based on heap automata that allows us to derive asymptotically optimal decision procedures for a wide range of robustness properties in a uniform way. We implemented a protoype of our framework and obtained promising results for all of the aforementioned robustness properties. Further, we demonstrate the applicability of heap automata beyond robustness properties. We apply our algorithmic framework to the model checking and the entailment problem for symbolic-heap separation logic.