We develop a doubly exponential decision procedure for the satisfiability problem ofguarded separation logic—a novel fragment of separation logic featuring user-supplied inductive predicates, Boolean connectives, and separating connectives, including restricted (guarded) versions of negation, magic wand, and septraction. Moreover, we show that dropping the guards for any of the preceding connectives leads to an undecidable fragment. We further apply our decision procedure to reason aboutentailmentsin the popular symbolic heap fragment of separation logic. In particular, we obtain a doubly exponential decision procedure for entailments between (quantifier-free) symbolic heaps with inductive predicate definitions of bounded treewidth (SLbtw)—one of the most expressive decidable fragments of separation logic. Together with the recently shown2ExpTime-hardness for entailments in said fragment, we conclude that the entailment problem forSLbtwis2ExpTime-complete—thereby closing a previously open complexity gap.

Most automated verifiers for separation logic are based on the symbolic-heap fragment, which disallows both the magic-wand operator and the application of classical Boolean operators to spatial formulas. This is not surprising, as support for the magic wand quickly leads to undecidability, especially when combined with inductive predicates for reasoning about data structures. To circumvent these undecidability results, we propose assigning a more restrictive semantics to the separating conjunction. We argue that the resulting logic, strong-separation logic, can be used for symbolic execution and abductive reasoning just like “standard” separation logic, while remaining decidable even in the presence of both the magic wand and inductive predicates (we consider a list-segment predicate and a tree predicate)—a combination of features that leads to undecidability for the standard semantics.

Abstract Most automated verifiers for separation logic are based on the symbolic-heap fragment, which disallows both the magic-wand operator and the application of classical Boolean operators to spatial formulas. This is not surprising, as support for the magic wand quickly leads to undecidability, especially when combined with inductive predicates for reasoning about data structures. To circumvent these undecidability results, we propose assigning a more restrictive semantics to the separating conjunction. We argue that the resulting logic, strong-separation logic, can be used for symbolic execution and abductive reasoning just like “standard” separation logic, while remaining decidable even in the presence of both the magic wand and the list-segment predicate—a combination of features that leads to undecidability for the standard semantics.

Symbolic-heap separation logic with inductive definitions is a popular formalism for reasoning about heap-manipulating programs. The fragment SLIDbtw introduced by Iosif, Rogalewicz and Simacek, is one of the most expressive fragments with a decidable entailment problem. In recent work, we improved on the original decidability proof by providing a direct model-theoretic construction, obtaining a 2-Exptime upper bound. In this paper, we investigate separation logics built on top of the inductive definitions from SLIDbtw, i.e., logics that feature the standard Boolean and separation-logic operators. We give an almost tight delineation between decidability and undecidabilty. We establish the decidability of the satisfiability problem (in 2-Exptime) of a separation logic with conjunction, disjunction, separating conjunction and guarded forms of negation, magic wand, and septraction. We show that any further generalization leads to undecidabilty (under mild assumptions).

Symbolic-Heap Separation logic is a popular formalism for automated reasoning about heap-manipulating programs, which allows the user to give customized data structure definitions. In this paper, we give a new decidability proof for the separation logic fragment of Iosif, Rogalewicz and Simacek. We circumvent the reduction to MSO from their proof and provide a direct model-theoretic construction with elementary complexity. We implemented our approach in the Harrsh analyzer and evaluate its effectiveness. In particular, we show that Harrsh can decide the entailment problem for data structure definitions for which no previous decision procedures have been implemented.

SL-COMP aims at bringing together researchers interested on improving the state of the art of the automated deduction methods for Separation Logic (SL). The event took place twice until now and collected more than 1K problems for different fragments of SL. The input format of problems is based on the SMT-LIB format and therefore fully typed; only one new command is added to SMT-LIB’s list, the command for the declaration of the heap’s type. The SMT-LIB theory of SL comes with ten logics, some of them being combinations of SL with linear arithmetics. The competition’s divisions are defined by the logic fragment, the kind of decision problem (satisfiability or entailment) and the presence of quantifiers. Until now, SL-COMP has been run on the StarExec platform, where the benchmark set and the binaries of participant solvers are freely available. The benchmark set is also available with the competition’s documentation on a public repository in GitHub.