Inferring data polymorphism in systems code

Authors:
Brian Hackett;Alex Aiken
Affiliations:
Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
Venue:
Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGSOFT symposium and the 13th European conference on Foundations of software engineering
Year:
2011

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Abstract

We describe techniques for analyzing data polymorphism in C, and show that understanding data polymorphism is important for statically verifying type casts in the Linux kernel, where our techniques prove the safety of 75% of downcasts to structure types, out of a population of 28767. We also discuss prevalent patterns of data polymorphism in Linux, including code patterns we can handle and those we cannot.