Logical reasoning for disjoint permissions

Abstract

Resource sharing is a fundamental phenomenon in concurrent programming where several threads have permissions to access a common resource. Logics for verification need to capture the notion of permission ownership and transfer. One typical practice is the use of rational numbers in (0, 1] as permissions in which 1 is the full permission and the rest are fractional permissions. Rational permissions are not a good fit for separation logic because they remove the essential “disjointness” feature of the logic itself. We propose a general logic framework that supports permission reasoning in separation logic while preserving disjointness. Our framework is applicable to sophisticated verification tasks such as doing induction over the finiteness of the heap within the object logic or carrying out biabductive inference. We can also prove precision of recursive predicates within the object logic. We developed the ShareInfer tool to benchmark our techniques. We introduce “scaling separation algebras,” a compositional extension of separation algebras, to model our logic, and use them to construct a concrete model. © The Author(s) 2018.