Cell morphing: from array programs to array-free Horn clauses

International audienceAutomatically verifying safety properties of programs is hard.Many approaches exist for verifying programs operating on Boolean and integer values (e.g. abstract interpretation, counterexample-guided abstraction refinement using interpolants), but transposing them to array properties has been fraught with difficulties.Our work addresses that issue with a powerful and flexible abstractionthat morphes concrete array cells into a finite set of abstractones. This abstraction is parametric both in precision and in theback-end analysis used.From our programs with arrays, we generate nonlinear Horn clauses overscalar variables only, in a common format with clear and unambiguouslogical semantics, for which there exist several solvers. We thusavoid the use of solvers operating over arrays, which are still veryimmature.Experiments with our prototype VAPHOR show that this approach can proveautomatically and without user annotationsthe functional correctness of several classical examples, including \emph{selection sort}, \emph{bubble sort}, \emph{insertion sort}, as well as examples from literature on array analysis