Reference. Code-Specify-Test-Debug-Prove: Flexibly Integrating Separation Logic Specification into Conventional Workflows

Zain K Aamer, Rini Banerjee, Hiroyuki Katsura, David Kaloper-Meršinjak, Dimitrios J. Economou, Kayvan Memarian, Dhruv Makwana, Neel Krishnaswami, Benjamin C. Pierce, Christopher Pulte, Peter Sewell · PLDI · 2026 · separation-logic · PDF · DOI · pldb
We seek to enable more flexible use of rich specifications in a variety of ways that smoothly extend conventional software development practice. We show how a single specification language, based on separation logic to capture the subtle ownership disciplines of systems code, can be used for runtime assertion checking, for property-based testing, and for formal machine-checked proof—and how each of these complements and supports the others. We demonstrate all this on a challenging example: a component of a production hypervisor, running both stand-alone at user level and in situ in the hypervisor.

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Cite as @aamer-2026-code (helia, typst) · \cite{aamer-2026-code} (LaTeX)
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bibtex · 1 line
@article{aamer-2026-code, title={Code-Specify-Test-Debug-Prove: Flexibly Integrating Separation Logic Specification into Conventional Workflows}, volume={10}, ISSN={2475-1421}, url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3808278}, DOI={10.1145/3808278}, number={PLDI}, journal={Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages}, publisher={Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)}, author={Aamer, Zain K and Banerjee, Rini and Katsura, Hiroyuki and Kaloper-Meršinjak, David and Economou, Dimitrios J. and Memarian, Kayvan and Makwana, Dhruv and Krishnaswami, Neel and Pierce, Benjamin C. and Pulte, Christopher and Sewell, Peter}, year={2026}, month=June, pages={778–804} }
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aamer-2026-code:
  type: article
  title: 'Code-Specify-Test-Debug-Prove: Flexibly Integrating Separation Logic Specification into Conventional Workflows'
  author:
  - Aamer, Zain K
  - Banerjee, Rini
  - Katsura, Hiroyuki
  - Kaloper-Meršinjak, David
  - Economou, Dimitrios J.
  - Memarian, Kayvan
  - Makwana, Dhruv
  - Krishnaswami, Neelakantan R.
  - Pierce, Benjamin C.
  - Pulte, Christopher
  - Sewell, Peter
  date: 2026-06
  page-range: 778-804
  serial-number:
    doi: 10.1145/3808278
  parent:
    type: periodical
    title: Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages
    publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
    issue: PLDI
    volume: 10
Download: aamer-2026-code.bib · aamer-2026-code.yml
Cites 78 works (4 here)
With notes (4)

Fulminate: Testing CN Separation-Logic Specifications in C banerjee-2025-fulminatePOPL · 2025
Separation logic has become an important tool for formally capturing and reasoning about the ownership patterns of imperative programs, originally for paper proof, and now the foundation for industrial static analyses and multiple proof tools. However, there has been very little work on program testing of separationlogic specifications in concrete execution. At first sight, separation-logic formulas are hard to evaluate in reasonable time, with their implicit quantification over heap splittings, and other explicit existentials. In this paper we observe that a restricted fragment of separation logic, adopted in the CN proof tool to enable predictable proof automation, also has a natural and readable computational interpretation, that makes it practically usable in runtime testing. We discuss various design issues and develop this as a C + CN source to C source translation, Fulminate. This adds checks – including ownership checks and ownership transfer – for C code annotated with CN pre- and post-conditions; we demonstrate this on nontrivial examples, including the allocator from a production hypervisor. We formalise our runtime ownership testing scheme, showing (and proving) how its reified ghost state correctly captures ownership passing, in a semantics for a small C-like language.
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CN: Verifying Systems C Code with Separation-Logic Refinement Types pulte-2023-cnPOPL · 2023
Despite significant progress in the verification of hypervisors, operating systems, and compilers, and in verification tooling, there exists a wide gap between the approaches used in verification projects and conventional development of systems software. We see two main challenges in bringing these closer together: verification handling the complexity of code and semantics of conventional systems software, and verification usability. We describe an experiment in verification tool design aimed at addressing some aspects of both: we design and implement CN, a separation-logic refinement type system for C systems software, aimed at predictable proof automation, based on a realistic semantics of ISO C. CN reduces refinement typing to decidable propositional logic reasoning, uses first-class resources to support pointer aliasing and pointer arithmetic, features resource inference for iterated separating conjunction, and uses a novel syntactic restriction of ghost variables in specifications to guarantee their successful inference. We implement CN and formalise key aspects of the type system, including a soundness proof of type checking. To demonstrate the usability of CN we use it to verify a substantial component of Google’s pKVM hypervisor for Android.
PDF · DOI · pldb

Iris from the ground up: A modular foundation for higher-order concurrent separation logic jung_etal_iris_ground_up_2018JFP · 2018
Iris is a framework for higher-order concurrent separation logic, which has been implemented in the Coq proof assistant and deployed very effectively in a wide variety of verification projects. Iris was designed with the express goal of simplifying and consolidating the foundations of modern separation logics, but it has evolved over time, and the design and semantic foundations of Iris itself have yet to be fully written down and explained together properly in one place. Here, we attempt to fill this gap, presenting a reasonably complete picture of the latest version of Iris (version 3.1), from first principles and in one coherent narrative.
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IronFleet: proving practical distributed systems correct hawblitzel-2015-ironfleetSOSP · 2015
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aamer-2026-code reference entries/refs/aamer-2026-code/aamer-2026-code.hel