Better Counterexamples for Dafny

Abstract

Abstract Dafny is a verification-aware programming language used at Amazon Web Services to develop critical components of their access management, storage, and cryptography infrastructures. The Dafny toolchain provides a verifier that can prove an implementation of a method satisfies its specification. When the underlying SMT solver cannot establish a proof, it generates a counterexample. These counterexamples are hard to understand and their interpretation is often a bottleneck in the proof debugging process. In this paper, we introduce an open-source tool that transforms counterexamples generated by the SMT solver to a more user-friendly format that maps to the Dafny syntax and is suitable for further processing. This new tool allows the Dafny developers to quickly identify the root cause of a problem with their proof, thereby speeding up the development of Dafny projects.