Equivalence and Safety Checking in Cryptol
Galois, Inc.
The Cryptol language comes with an integrated verification tool-set that can automatically perform equivalence and safety checking on Cryptol programs. Recently, we have presented a paper on this topic at PLPV'09: "Programming Languages Meets Program Verification" workshop. (Slides are also available.)
Briefly, equivalence checking refers to the problem of proving that two functions have the exact same input/output behavior. Typically, these functions are versions of the same algorithm; one being a reference implementation and the other being an optimized version. Cryptol automatically establishes that the optimized version is precisely equivalent to the original. If the functions are not equivalent, Cryptol provides a counter-example where they disagree; aiding greatly in development/debugging.
Safety checking refers to the problem of proving that the execution of a function cannot raise any exceptions; such as division by zero; index out-of-bounds, etc. When the safety checker says that a function is safe, you will know for sure that such conditions will never arise at run-time. (Similarly, you will get a concrete counter-example from Cryptol if this is not the case.)
Cryptol uses symbolic simulation to translate equivalence and safety checking problems to equivalent problems using the bit-vector logic of SMT-Lib. Furthermore, Cryptol has built-in connections to several SAT/SMT solvers. It automatically calls these provers and presents the results to the user in original Cryptol terms; providing a seamless verification environment for the end-user.
The full paper and slides on equivalence checking in Cryptol are available for download.