Efficient Data Model Verification with Many-Sorted Logic

Misuse or loss of web application data can have catastrophic consequences in today’s Internet oriented world. Hence, verification of web application data models is of paramount importance. We have developed a framework for verification of web application data models via translation to First Order Logic (FOL), followed by automated theorem proving. Due to the undecidability of FOL, this automated approach does not always produce a conclusive answer. In this paper, we investigate the use of many-sorted logic in data model verification in order to improve the effectiveness of this approach. Many-sorted logic allows us to specify type information explicitly, thus lightening the burden of reasoning about type information during theorem proving. Our experiments demonstrate that using many-sorted logic improves the verification performance significantly, and completely eliminates inconclusive results in all cases over 7 real world web applications, down from an 17% inconclusive rate.