Automated Formal Verification of Programs with Dynamic Data Structures Using State-of-the-Art Tools

This paper investigates capabilities of two advanced state-of-the-art tools-namely Pale and TVLA-for automated formal verification of programs manipulating unbounded dynamic data structures. We consider verification of operations dealing with binary search trees over which we want to verify the basic correctness of pointer manipulations (no null pointer dereferences, etc.) as well as the sortedness requirement of binary search trees. Unlike in other works, we want to verify the full sortedness requirement, i.e. that all nodes in the left subtree of a node n are smaller than n, and all nodes in the right subtree of n are bigger than n (and not just the relation between a node and its direct subnodes). For the needs of verifying this property in the TVLA tool, we provide a new kind of instrumentation predicate that allows one to handle such a property.