Verification of Programs with Pointers in SPARK.

In the field of deductive software verification, programs with pointers present a major challenge due to pointer aliasing. In this paper, we introduce pointers to SPARK, a well-defined subset of the Ada language, intended for formal verification of mission-critical software. Our solution uses a permission-based static alias analysis method inspired by Rust’s borrow-checker and affine types . To validate our approach, we have implemented it in the SPARK GNATprove formal verification toolset for Ada. In the paper, we give a formal presentation of the analysis rules for a core version of SPARK and discuss their implementation and scope.