Checking Satisfiability of Hyperproperties using First-Order Logic

Abstract

Hyperproperties are system properties that relate multiple execution traces and occur, e.g., when specifying security and information-flow properties. Checking if a hyperproperty is satisfiable has many important applications, such as testing if some security property is contradictory, or analyzing implications and equivalences between information-flow policies. In this paper, we present FOLHyper, a tool that can automatically check satisfiability of hyperproperties specified in the temporal logic HyperLTL. FOLHyper reduces the problem to an equisatisfiable first-order logic (FOL) formula, which allows us to leverage FOL solvers for the analysis of hyperproperties. As such, FOLHyper is applicable to many formulas beyond the decidable $\exists^*\forall^*$ fragment of HyperLTL. Our experiments show that FOLHyper is particularly useful for proving that a formula is unsatisfiable, and complements existing bounded approaches to satisfiability.