Quantifiers on Demand

Abstract

Automated program verification is a difficult problem. It is undecidable even for transition systems over Linear Integer Arithmetic (LIA). Extending the transition system with theory of Arrays, further complicates the problem by requiring inference and reasoning with universally quantified formulas. In this paper, we present a new algorithm, Quic3, that extends IC3 to infer universally quantified invariants over the combined theory of LIA and Arrays. Unlike other approaches that use either IC3 or an SMT solver as a black box, Quic3 carefully manages quantified generalization (to construct quantified invariants) and quantifier instantiation (to detect convergence in the presence of quantifiers). While Quic3 is not guaranteed to converge, it is guaranteed to make progress by exploring longer and longer executions. We have implemented Quic3 within the Constrained Horn Clause solver engine of Z3 and experimented with it by applying Quic3 to verifying a variety of public benchmarks of array manipulating C programs.