Proving Resource Consumption of Low-level Programs Using Automated Theorem Provers

In this paper we use a program logic and automatic theorem provers to certify resource usage of low-level bytecode programs equipped with annotations describing resource consumption for methods. We have adapted an existing resource counting logic [Aspinall, D., L. Beringer, M. Hofmann, H.-W. Loidl and A. Momigliano, A program logic for resource verification, in: Proceedings of 17th International Conference on Theorem Proving in Higher Order Logics (TPHOLs2004), Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3223 (2004), pp. 34–49] to fit the first-order setting, implemented a verification condition generator, and tested our approach on programs that contain recursion and deal with recursive data structures. We have successfully applied our framework to programs that did not involve any updates to recursive data structures. But mutation is more tricky because of aliasing of heap. We discuss problems related to this and suggest techniques to solve them.