Abstract
With the incresasing importance of program verification, an issue that has been receiving more attention is the certification of verification tools, addressing the vernacular question: Who verifies the verifier?. In this paper we approach this meta-verification problem by focusing on a fundamental component of program verifiers: the Verification Conditions Generator (VCGen), responsible for producing a set of proof obligations from a program and a specification. The semantic foundations of VCGens lie in program logics, such as Hoare logic, Dynamic logic, or Separation logic, and related predicate transformers. Dynamic logic is the basis of the KeY system, one of the foremost deductive verifiers, whose logic makes use of the notion of update, which is quite intricate to formalize. In this paper we derive systematically, based on a KeY-style dynamic logic, a correct-by-construction VCGen for a toy programming language. Our workflow covers the entire process, from the logic to the VCGen. It is implemented in the Why3 tool, which is itself a program verifier. We prove the soundness and (an appropriate notion of) completeness of the logic, then define a VCGen for our language and establish its soundness. Dynamic logic is one of a variety of research topics that our dear friend and colleague Luis Soares Barbosa has, over the years, initiated and promoted at the University of Minho. It is a pleasure for us to dedicate this work to him on the occasion of his 60th birthday.

Abstract
We study principles and models for reasoning inductively about properties of distributed systems, based on programmed atomic handlers equipped with contracts. We present the Why3-do library, leveraging a state of the art software verifier for reasoning about distributed systems based on our models. A number of examples involving invariants containing existential and nested quantifiers (including Dijsktra's self-stabilizing systems) illustrate how the library promotes contract-based modular development, abstraction barriers, and automated proofs.

Abstract
The present Special Issue of the Journal of Logical and Algebraic Methods in Programming was planned as a tribute to Jose Manuel Esgalhado Valenca on the occasion of his Jubilation. A tribute to a professor, in the deepest sense of the word, a colleague and a friend, but above all to a long and inspiring academic journey that has so profoundly shaped the development of Informatics as a scientific area in Portugal. A scientific area that, as he taught us, needs to be understood broadly: not only as an independent research domain, but also as an educational pillar, a strategy for social and economic development, a foundation for a multifaceted professional career. This preface introduces some steps of such a journey. The Special Issue features a selection of scientific papers written by his collaborators, colleagues and friends, covering the different areas Jose Valenca helped to launch and consolidate in Portugal, namely computational logic, verification and mechanized reasoning, and information security. (c) 2022 Published by Elsevier Inc.

Abstract
Deductive verification has gained paramount attention from both academia and industry. Although intensive research in this direction covers almost all mainstream languages, the research community has paid little attention to the verification of database applications. This paper proposes a comprehensive set of Verification Conditions (VCs) generation techniques from database programs, adapting Symbolic Execution, Conditional Normal Form, and Weakest Precondition. The validity checking of the generated VCs for a database program determines its correctness w.r.t. the annotated database properties. The developed prototype DBverify based on our theoretical foundation allows us to instantiate VC generation from PL/SQL codes, yielding to detailed performance analysis of the three approaches under different circumstances. With respect to the literature, the proposed approach shows its competence to support crucial SQL features (aggregate functions, nested queries, NULL values, and set operations) and the embedding of SQL codes within a host imperative language. For the chosen set of benchmark PL/SQL codes annotated with relevant properties of interest, our experiment shows that only 38% of procedures are correct, while 62% violate either all or part of the annotated properties. The primary cause for the latter case is mostly due to the acceptance of runtime inputs in SQL statements without proper checking.

Abstract
Data races, a condition where two memory accesses to the same memory location occur concurrently, have been shown to be a major source of concurrency bugs in distributed systems. Unfortunately, data races are often triggered by non-deterministic event orderings that are hard to detect when testing complex distributed systems. In this paper, we propose Spider, an automated tool for identifying data races in distributed system traces. Spider encodes the causal relations between the events in the trace as a symbolic constraint model, which is then fed into an SMT solver to check for the presence of conflicting concurrent accesses. To reduce the constraint solving time, Spider employs a pruning technique aimed at removing redundant portions of the trace. Our experiments with multiple benchmarks show that Spider is effective in detecting data races in distributed executions in a practical amount of time, providing evidence of its usefulness as a testing tool. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020.