Pointer Analysis, Conditional Soundness, and Proving the Absence of Errors

  • Authors:
  • Christopher L. Conway;Dennis Dams;Kedar S. Namjoshi;Clark Barrett

  • Affiliations:
  • Dept. of Computer Science, New York University,;Bell Laboratories, Alcatel-Lucent,;Bell Laboratories, Alcatel-Lucent,;Dept. of Computer Science, New York University,

  • Venue:
  • SAS '08 Proceedings of the 15th international symposium on Static Analysis
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

It is well known that the use of points-to information can substantially improve the accuracy of a static program analysis. Commonly used algorithms for computing points-to information are known to be sound only for memory-safe programs. Thus, it appears problematic to utilize points-to information to verify the memory safety property without giving up soundness. We show that a sound combination is possible, even if the points-to information is computed separately and only conditionally sound. This result is based on a refined statement of the soundness conditions of points-to analyses and a general mechanism for composing conditionally sound analyses.