Abstract Interpretation as Automated Deduction

Abstract

Algorithmic deduction and abstract interpretation are two widely used and successful approaches to implementing program verifiers. A major impediment to combining these approaches is that their mathematical foundations and implementation approaches are fundamentally different. This paper presents a new, logical perspective on abstract interpreters that perform reachability analysis using non-relational domains. We encode reachability of a location in a control-flow graph as satisfiability in a monadic, second-order logic parameterized by a first-order theory. We show that three components of an abstract interpreter, the lattice, transformers and iteration algorithm, represent a first-order, substructural theory, parametric deduction and abduction in that theory, and second-order constraint propagation.