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Aneris

Aneris is a higher-order distributed concurrent separation logic for developing and verifying distributed systems with facilities for modular specification and verification of partial correctness properties and refinement. The logic is built using the Iris program logic framework and mechanized in the Coq proof assistant.

Recent documentation of Aneris is available here.

Compiling

The project maintains compatibility with Coq 8.18 and relies on coqc being available in your shell. Clone the external git submodule dependencies using

git submodule update --init --recursive

Alternatively, clone the repository using the --recurse-submodules flag.

Run make -jN to build the full development, where N is the number of your CPU cores.

Directory Structure

• trillium/: The Trillium program logic framework

• aneris/: The Aneris instantiation of Trillium

  • examples/: examples and case studies

• fairness/: A HeapLang instantiation of Trillium for reasoning about fair termination of concurrent programs.

• ml_sources/: The Multicore OCaml source files

  • aneris_lang/: shim and aneris libraries
  • examples/: examples and case studies

Git submodule dependencies

This project uses git submodules to manage dependencies with other Coq libraries. By default, when working with a repository that uses submodules, the submodules will not be populated and updated automatically, and it is often necessary to invoke git submodule update --init --recursive or use the --recurse-submodules flag. However, this can be automated by setting the submodule.recurse setting to true in your git config by running

git config --global submodule.recurse true

This will make git clone, git checkout, git pull, etc. work as you would expect and it should rarely be necessary to invoke any git submodule update commands.

A git submodule is pinned to a particular commit of an external (remote) repository. If new commits have been pushed to the remote repository and you wish to integrate these in to the development, invoke

git submodule update --remote

to fetch the new commits and apply them to your local repository. This changes which commit your local submodule is pinned to. Remember to commit and push the submodule update to make it visible to other users of the repository.

Read more about git submodules in this tutorial.

Compiling from OCaml sources

To generate AnerisLang programs from OCaml source files, pin the ocaml2lang package:

opam pin git+https://github.com/leon-gondelman/ocaml2lang#multicore

This will produce an executable o2a. After installation succeeds, you can try o2a by doing

o2a --help

You can now run

o2a --rewrite

at the root of the repository to generate Coq files from the OCaml sources in ml_sources. To compile the source files, run

dune build --root .

at the root of the repository.

Publications

Aneris was initially presented in the ESOP 2020 paper Aneris: A Mechanised Logic for Modular Reasoning about Distributed Systems by Morten Krogh-Jespersen, Amin Timany, Marit Edna Ohlenbusch, Simon Oddershede Gregersen, and Lars Birkedal. Since then, the duplicate protection assumption as described in the paper has been relaxed.

At POPL 2022, a formal specification and verification of causally-consistent distributed key-values store using Aneris was presented in the paper Distributed Causal Memory: Modular Specification and Verification in Higher-Order Distributed Separation Logic by Leon Gondelman, Simon Oddershede Gregersen, Abel Nieto, Amin Timany, and Lars Birkedal. This development is available in the aneris/examples/ccddb folder.

Trillium is a program logic framework for both proving partial correctness properties and trace properties; Aneris is now an instantiation of the Trillium framework.

Aneris also supports trace-based reasoning to establish free theorems using the the method described in Theorems for Free from Separation Logic Specifications. In fact, parts of the Coq development accompaying the paper are injected into the Aneris program logic.