POPL 2026
Sun 11 - Sat 17 January 2026 Rennes, France
Tue 13 Jan 2026 14:22 - 14:45 at Belvédère - Program verification Chair(s): Clement Pit-Claudel

Symbolic execution (SE) is a program analysis technique that executes the program with symbolic inputs. In modern SE engines, when the analysis of a given program is exhaustive, the analyzed program is typically considered safe, i.e., free of bugs, but no formal guarantees are provided to support this. Rather than aiming for a formally verified SE engine that will provide such guarantees, which is challenging, we propose a systematic approach where each individual analysis additionally outputs a formal safety proof that validates the symbolic computations that were carried out. Our approach consists of two main components: A formal framework connecting concrete and symbolic semantics, and an instrumentation of the SE engine which generates formal safety proofs based on this framework. We showcase our approach by implementing a KLEE-based prototype that operates on a subset of LLVM IR with integers and generates proofs in Coq. Our preliminary experiments show that our approach generates proofs that have reasonable validation times, while the instrumentation incurs only a minor overhead on the SE engine. In addition, during the implementation of our prototype, we found previously unknown semantic implementation issues in KLEE.

Tue 13 Jan

Displayed time zone: Brussels, Copenhagen, Madrid, Paris change

14:00 - 15:30
Program verificationCPP at Belvédère
Chair(s): Clement Pit-Claudel EPFL
14:00
22m
Talk
Certified Symbolic Finite Transducers: Formalization and Applications to String Analysis
CPP
Shuanglong Kan Barkhausen Institute, Dresden, Anthony Widjaja Lin TU Kaiserslautern; MPI-SWS
14:22
22m
Talk
Enhancing Symbolic Execution with Machine-Checked Safety Proofs
CPP
David Trabish Technion, Shachar Itzhaky Technion
Pre-print
14:45
22m
Talk
Layers of Confluence for Actors
CPP
Ludovic Henrio University of Lyon - ENS Lyon - UCBL - CNRS - Inria - LIP, Einar Broch Johnsen University of Oslo, Åsmund Aqissiaq Arild Kløvstad University of Oslo (UiO), Violet Ka I Pun Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Yannick Zakowski Inria
15:07
22m
Talk
Towards composable proofs of cache coherence protocols
CPP