Cyclic abduction of inductively defined safety and termination preconditions

Abstract. We introduce cyclic abduction: a new method for automati-cally inferring safety and termination preconditions of heap-manipulating while programs, expressed as inductive definitions in separation logic. Cyclic abduction essentially works by searching for a cyclic proof of the desired property, abducing definitional clauses of the precondition as necessary in order to advance the proof search process. We provide an implementation, Caber, of our cyclic abduction method, based on a suite of heuristically guided tactics. It is often able to auto-matically infer preconditions describing lists, trees, cyclic and composite structures which, in other tools, previously had to be supplied by hand.