Symbolic pointer analysis for detecting memory leaks

  • Authors:

  • Berhard Scholz;Johann Blieberger;Thomas Fahringer

  • Affiliations:

  • Institute for Computer Languages, Vienna University of Technology, Austria;Department of Computer-Aided Automation, Vienna University of Technology, Austria;Institute for Softwaretechnology and Parallel Systems, University of Vienna, Austria

  • Venue:
  • PEPM '00 Proceedings of the 2000 ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Partial evaluation and semantics-based program manipulation
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

It is well accepted that pointers are a common source of memory anomalies such as loosing references to dynamic records without deallocating them (also known as memory leaks). This paper presents a novel pointer analysis framework that detects memory leaks by statically analyzing the behavior of programs.Our approach is based on symbolic evaluation of programs. Symbolic evaluation is an advanced static symbolic analysis that is centered around symbolic variable values, assumptions about and constraints between variable values, and control flow information (path conditions). As part of symbolic evaluation we introduce a new symbolic heap algebra for modeling heap operations. Predicates — defined over the program's input — are derived which allow to detect memory leaks. Our approach goes beyond previous work in the field of statically detecting memory leaks by considering also path conditions which increases the accuracy of our results, symbolically modeling heap data structures and heap operations. Examples are used to illustrate the effectiveness of our approach.