Sound and Complete Witnesses for Template-Based Verification of LTL Properties on Polynomial Programs

Abstract We study the classical problem of verifying programs with respect to formal specifications given in the linear temporal logic (LTL). We first present novel sound and complete witnesses for LTL verification over imperative programs. Our witnesses are applicable to both verification (proving) and refutation (finding bugs) settings. We then consider LTL formulas in which atomic propositions can be polynomial constraints and turn our focus to polynomial arithmetic programs, i.e. programs in which every assignment and guard consists only of polynomial expressions. For this setting, we provide an efficient algorithm to automatically synthesize such LTL witnesses. Our synthesis procedure is both sound and semi-complete. Finally, we present experimental results demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach and that it can handle programs which were beyond the reach of previous state-of-the-art tools.