Verifying pointer and string analyses with region type systems

Abstract

Pointer analysis statically approximates the heap pointer structure during a program execution in order to track heap objects or to establish alias relations between references, and usually contributes to other analyses or code optimizations. In recent years, a number of algorithms have been presented that provide an efficient, scalable, and yet precise pointer analysis. However, it is unclear how the results of these algorithms compare to each other semantically.In this paper, we present a general region type system for a Java-like language and give a formal soundness proof. The system is subsequently specialized to obtain a platform for embedding the results of various existing context-sensitive pointer analysis algorithms, thereby equipping the computed relations with a common interpretation and verification. We illustrate our system by outlining an extension to a string value analysis that builds on pointer information.