Abstract

Formal program verification provides mathematical means of increasing assurance for the correctness of software. Most approaches to program verification are either fully automatic and prove only weak properties, or alternatively are manual and labour intensive to apply; few target realistically modelled machine code. The work presented in this dissertation aims to ease the effort required in proving properties of programs on top of detailed models of machine code. The contributions are novel approaches for both verification of existing programs and methods for automatically constructing correct code. For program verification, this thesis presents a new approach based on translation: the problem of proving properties of programs is reduced, via fully-automatic deduction, to a problem of proving properties of recursive functions. The translation from programs to recursive functions is shown to be implementable in a theorem prover both for simple while-programs as well as real machine code. This verification-after-translation approach has several advantages over established approaches of verification condition generation. In particular, the new approach does not require annotating the program with assertions. More

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