Syntax-driven program verification of matching logic properties

We describe a novel approach to program verification and its application to verification of C programs, where properties are expressed in matching logic. The general approach is syntax-directed: semantic rules, expressed according to Knuths attribute grammars, specify how verification conditions can be computed. Evaluation is performed by interplaying attribute computation and propagation through the syntax tree with invocation of a solver of logic formulae. The benefit of a general syntax-driven approach is that it provides a reusable reference scheme for implementing verifiers for different languages. We show that the instantiation of a general approach to a specific language does not penalize the efficiency of the resulting verifier. This is done by comparing our C verifier for matching logic with an existing tool for the same programming language and logic. A further key advantage of the syntax-directed approach is that it can be the starting point for an incremental verifier -- which is our long-term research target