Pointer Analysis for Source-to-Source Transformations

Many program analyses benefit, both in precision and performance, from precise pointer analysis. An important dimension of pointer analysis precision is flow-sensitivity, which has been shown to be useful for applications such as program verification and static analysis of binary code, among many others. However, flow-sensitive pointer analysis has historically been unable to scale to programs with millions of lines of code. We present a new flow-sensitive pointer analysis algorithm that is an order of magnitude faster than the existing state of the art, enabling for the first time flow-sensitive pointer analysis for programs with millions of lines of code. Our flow-sensitive algorithm is based on a sparse representation of program code created by a staged, flow-insensitive pointer analysis. We explain how this new algorithm is a member of a new family of pointer analysis algorithms that deserves further study.

Programs which manipulate pointers are hard to debug. Pointer analysis algorithms (originally aimed at optimizing compilers) may provide some remedy by identifying potential errors such as dereferencing NULL pointers by statically analyzing the behavior of programs on all their input data.Our goal is to identify the "core program analysis techniques" that can be used when developing realistic tools which detect memory errors at compile time without, generating too many false alarms. Our preliminary experience indicates that the following techniques are necessary: (i) finding aliases between pointers, (ii) flow sensitive techniques that account, for the program control flow constructs. (iii) partial interpretation of conditional statements, (iv) analysis of the relationships between pointers, and sometimes (v) analysis of the underlying data structures manipulated by the C program.We show that a combination of these techniques can yield better results than those achieved by state of the art tools. Yet it is not clear to us whether our ideas are applicable to large programs.

We present an information-merging technique for efficient computation of points-to information for C programs. Invalid use of pointers can lead to hard-to-find bugs and may expose security vulnerabilities. Thus, analyzing them is critical for software analysis as well as optimization. Pointer analysis is a key step during compilation, and the computed points-to information is useful for client analyses from varied domains such as bug finding, data-flow analysis, identifying security vulnerabilities, and parallelization, to name a few. Former research on pointer analysis has indicated that the main bottleneck towards scalability is large propagation of points-to information in the constraint graph. To reduce the propagation cost, we present a technique based on temporal similarity of points-to sets. The method tracks pointers whose dynamically changing points-to information remains equal for a while. Based on the optimism gained by observing the points-to sets over time, the analysis decides to merge the corresponding nodes. Using the notion of merge and split, we build a family of points-to analyses, and compare their relative precisions in the context of existing analyses. We illustrate the effectiveness of our approach using a suite of sixteen SPEC 2000 benchmarks and three large open-source programs, and show that the technique improves the analysis time over BDD and bitmap based Hybrid Cycle Detection, well-known Andersen's analysis, and Deep Propagation, affecting minimal precision (precision is 96.4% on an average). Specifically, it is faster than Deep Propagation by 45%.

In order to overcome the manpower and time problems of two types of syntactically similar program conversion systems, this paper proposes an automatic conversion system for two types of syntactically similar programs based on the compilation principle. The method is divided into three stages: lexical analysis, syntactic analysis and semantic analysis. The lexical analysis scans the source program character by character from left to right and generates a sequence of words for syntactic analysis. Syntactic analysis further groups the symbols of the source program to generate a syntax tree representing the structure of the source program. Semantic analysis traverses the syntax tree to find the rule base for implementing the source program. Finally the syntax tree is traversed to generate the target program. In creating the syntax tree, the composition mode is used, while in traversing the syntax tree, the visitor mode is used. The experimental results show that these two methods can reduce the time of manual conversion.

Pointer analysis is a prerequisite for many program analyses, and the effectiveness of these analyses depends on the precision of the pointer information they receive. Two major axes of pointer analysis precision are flow-sensitivity and context-sensitivity, and while there has been significant recent progress regarding scalable context-sensitive pointer analysis, relatively little progress has been made in improving the scalability of flow-sensitive pointer analysis.This paper presents a new interprocedural, flow-sensitive pointer analysis algorithm that combines two ideas-semi-sparse analysis and a novel use of BDDs-that arise from a careful understanding of the unique challenges that face flow-sensitive pointer analysis. We evaluate our algorithm on 12 C benchmarks ranging from 11K to 474K lines of code. Our fastest algorithm is on average 197x faster and uses 4.6x less memory than the state of the art, and it can analyze programs that are an order of magnitude larger than the previous state of the art.

Ahstract-Points-to analysis is a fundamental, but computationally intensive technique for static program analysis, optimization, debugging and verification. Context-Free Language (CFL) reachability has been proposed and widely used in demand-driven points-to analyses that aims for computing specific points-to relations on demand rather than all variables in the program. However, CFL-reachability-based points-to analysis still faces challenges when applied in practice especially for flow-sensitive points-to analysis, which aims at improving the precision of points-to analysis by taking account of the execution order of program statements. We propose a scalable approach named Parseeker to parallelize flow-sensitive demand-driven points-to analysis via CFL-reachability in order to improve the performance of points-to analysis with high precision. Our core insights are to (1) produce and process a set of fine-grained, parallelizable queries of points-to relations for the objective program, and (2) take a CFL-reachability-based points-to analysis to answer each query. The MapReduce is used to parallelize the queries and three optimization strategies are designed for further enhancing the efficiency.

How to detect and classify the huge malware samples received every day is a major challenge of security area. In recent years, using function call graph to detect and classify malicious software has become a feasible method. As the basic technology of call graph construction, function pointer analysis becomes more noticeable. Previous works often use the result of pointer analysis to determine the possible targets of function pointer calls. However, the inherent complexity and efficiency problem of the pointer analysis often leads to unsatisfactory results when applied to practical programs. This paper presents a strong connected component (SCC) level flow-sensitive and context-sensitive function pointer analysis algorithm (referred as FP algorithm). This algorithm not only makes up for the speed deficiency of pointer analysis, but also obtains higher precision. Measurements for 8 practical C programs show that FP algorithm advances 42.6 times on average compared with DSA algorithm and the precision is also improved.

At each program point, points-to analysis for statically typed object oriented programming languages (e.g., Java, C++) determines those objects to which a reference may refer (or a pointer may point) during execution. Points-to analysis is necessary for any semantics based software tools for object oriented systems. Our new complexity results for points-to analysis distinguish the difficulty of intraprocedural and interprocedural points-to analyses for languages with combinations of single-level types (i.e., types with data members only of primitive type), exceptions with or without subtyping, and dynamic dispatch. Our results include: 1) the first polynomial-time algorithm for points-to analysis in the presence of exceptions that handles a robust subset of Java without threads and can be applied to C++; 2) proof that the above algorithm is safe, in general, and provably precise on programs with single-level types and exceptions without subtyping, but not dynamic dispatch, thus, this case is in P; 3) proof that an interprocedural points-to analysis problem with single-level types and exceptions with subtyping, but without dynamic dispatch, is PSPACE-hard, while the intraprocedural problem is PSPACE-complete. Other complexity characterizations of points-to analysis in programs without exceptions are presented, including an algorithm with worst-case bound of O(n/sup 5/), which improves over the O(n/sup 7/) worst-case bound achievable from previous approaches of T. Reps et al. (1995) and W.A. Landi and B.G. Ryder (1991).

Inclusion-based set constraint solving is the most popular technique for whole-program points-to analysis whereby an analysis is typically formulated as repeatedly resolving constraints between points-to sets of program variables. The set union operation is central to this process. The number of points-to sets can grow as analyses become more precise and input programs become larger, resulting in more time spent performing unions and more space used storing these points-to sets. Most existing approaches focus on improving scalability of precise points-to analyses from an algorithmic perspective and there has been less research into improving the data structures behind the analyses. Bit-vectors as one of the more popular data structures have been used in several mainstream analysis frameworks to represent points-to sets. To store memory objects in bit-vectors, objects need to mapped to integral identifiers. We observe that this object-to-identifier mapping is critical for a compact points-to set representation and the set union operation. If objects in the same points-to sets (co-pointees) are not given numerically close identifiers, points-to resolution can cost significantly more space and time. Without data on the unpredictable points-to relations which would be discovered by the analysis, an ideal mapping is extremely challenging. In this paper, we present a new approach to inclusion-based analysis by compacting points-to sets through object clustering. Inspired by recent staged analysis where an auxiliary analysis produces results approximating a more precise main analysis, we formulate points-to set compaction as an optimisation problem solved by integer programming using constraints generated from the auxiliary analysis’s results in order to produce an effective mapping. We then develop a more approximate mapping, yet much more efficiently, using hierarchical clustering to compact bit-vectors. We also develop an improved representation of bit-vectors (called core bit-vectors) to fully take advantage of the newly produced mapping. Our approach requires no algorithmic change to the points-to analysis. We evaluate our object clustering on flow sensitive points-to analysis using 8 open-source programs (>3.1 million lines of LLVM instructions) and our results show that our approach can successfully improve the analysis with an up to 1.83× speed up and an up to 4.05× reduction in memory usage.

This paper presents a new worklist algorithm that significantly speeds up a large class of flow-sensitive data-flow analyses, including typestate error checking and pointer analysis. Our algorithm works particularly well for interprocedural analyses. By contrast, traditional algorithms work well for individual procedures but do not scale well to interprocedural analysis because they spend too much time unnecessarily re-analyzing large parts of the program. Our algorithm solves this problem by exploiting the sparse nature of many analyses. The key to our approach is the use of interprocedural def-use chains, which allows our algorithm to re-analyze only those parts of the program that are affected by changes in the flow values. Unlike other techniques for sparse analysis, our algorithm does not rely on precomputed def-use chains, since this computation can itself require costly analysis, particularly in the presence of pointers. Instead, we compute def-use chains on the fly during the analysis, along with precise pointer information. When applied to large programs such as nn, our techniques improve analysis time by up to 90%—from 1974s to 190s—over a state of the art algorithm.

This report documents the program and the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 13162 ``Pointer Analysis''. The seminar had 27 attendees, including both pointer analysis experts and researchers developing clients in need of better pointer analysis. The seminar came at a key point in time, with pointer analysis techniques acquiring sophistication but still being just beyond the edge of wide practical deployment. The seminar participants presented recent research results, and identified key open problems and future directions for the field. This report presents abstracts of the participants' talks and summaries of the breakout sessions from the seminar.

Smart contracts on blockchain platforms are susceptible to security issues that can lead to significant financial losses. This study converts the Solidity code into abstract syntax trees and generates control flow graphs and data flow graphs. These graphs train a graph convolutional network model to detect security weaknesses. The proposed system outperforms traditional tools, achieving higher accuracy, recall, precision, and F1 scores when detecting weaknesses such as integer overflow/underflow, reentrancy, delegate call to the untrusted callee, and time-based issues. This study demonstrates that leveraging control and data flow analysis with graph neural networks significantly enhances smart contract security and provides a robust and reliable solution.

To improve software reliability, software defect prediction is utilized to assist developers in finding potential bugs and allocating their testing efforts. Traditional defect prediction studies mainly focus on designing hand-crafted features, which are input into machine learning classifiers to identify defective code. However, these hand-crafted features often fail to capture the semantic and structural information of programs. Such information is important in modeling program functionality and can lead to more accurate defect prediction.In this paper, we propose a framework called Defect Prediction via Convolutional Neural Network (DP-CNN), which leverages deep learning for effective feature generation. Specifically, based on the programs' Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs), we first extract token vectors, which are then encoded as numerical vectors via mapping and word embedding. We feed the numerical vectors into Convolutional Neural Network to automatically learn semantic and structural features of programs. After that, we combine the learned features with traditional hand-crafted features, for accurate software defect prediction. We evaluate our method on seven open source projects in terms of F-measure in defect prediction. The experimental results show that in average, DP-CNN improves the state-of-the-art method by 12%.

The LLVM intermediate representation (IR) lacks semantic constructs for depicting common high-performance operations such as parallel and concurrent execution, communication and synchronization. Currently, representing such semantics in LLVM requires either extending the intermediate form (a signi cant undertaking) or the use of ad hoc indirect means such as encoding them as intrinsics and/or the use of metadata constructs. In this paper we discuss a work in progress to explore the design and implementation of a new compilation stage and associated high-level intermediate form that is placed between the abstract syntax tree and when it is lowered to LLVM's IR. This highlevel representation is a superset of LLVM IR and supports the direct representation of these common parallel computing constructs along with the infrastructure for supporting analysis and transformation passes on this representation.

Evaluating the effectiveness of pointer alias analyses