Static program analysis of embedded executable assembly code

  • Authors:

  • Ramakrishnan Venkitaraman;Gopal Gupta

  • Affiliations:

  • The University of Texas at Dallas, TX;The University of Texas at Dallas, TX

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2004 international conference on Compilers, architecture, and synthesis for embedded systems
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

We consider the problem of automatically checking if coding standards have been followed in the development of embedded applications. The problem arises from practical considerations because DSP chip manufacturers (in our case Texas Instruments) want various third party software developers to adhere to a certain coding standard to facilitate system integration during application development. Checking for compliance with coding standards, in general, is undecidable. Moreover, only machine code of the system components is available since for proprietary reasons vendors of various components do not want to share their source code. In this paper, we describe an approach based on static analysis of embedded assembly code to check for compliance with such coding standards. This static analysis rests on an abstract interpretation framework. We illustrate our approach by showing how we statically analyze the presence of hard-coded pointer variables in embedded assembly code. Hard coded pointer variables are those that are assigned a fixed memory address by the programmer instead of being assigned a value via proper operations in the source language (e.g., malloc/calloc/realloc and & operator in C). Our analyzer takes object code as input, disassembles it, builds the flow-graph, and statically analyzes the flow-graph for the presence of dereferenced pointers that are hard coded. The analyzer is currently being extended to check for compliance with other rules adopted by TI as part of its coding standards.