Generic Static Analysis Research Articles

Towards harnessing theories through tool support for hard real-time Java programming

We present a rationale for a selection of tools that assist developers of hard real-time applications to verify that programs conform to a Java real-time profile and that platform-specific resource constraints are satisfied. These tools are specialised instances of more generic static analysis and model checking frameworks. The concepts are illustrated by two case studies, and the strengths and the limitations of the tools are discussed.

A generic static analyzer for multithreaded Java programs

SUMMARYIn this paper, we present heckmate, the first generic static analyzer of multithreaded Java programs based on abstract interpretation. heckmate can be tuned at different levels of precision and efficiency in order to prove various properties (e.g., absence of divisions by zero and data races), and it is sound for multithreaded programs. It supports all the most relevant features of Java multithreading, such as dynamic thread creation, runtime creation of monitors, and dynamic allocation of memory. The experimental results demonstrate that heckmate is accurate and efficient enough to analyze programs with some thousands of statements and a potentially infinite number of threads. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Safer unsafe code for .NET

The .NET intermediate language (MSIL) allows expressing both statically verifiable memory and type safe code (typically called managed), as well as unsafe code using direct pointer manipulations. Unsafe code can be expressed in C# by marking regions of code as unsafe . Writing unsafe code can be useful where the rules of managed code are too strict. The obvious drawback of unsafe code is that it opens the door to programming errors typical of C and C++, namely memory access errors such as buffer overruns. Worse, a single piece of unsafe code may corrupt memory and destabilize the entire runtime or allow attackers to compromise the security of the platform. We present a new static analysis based on abstract interpretation to check memory safety for unsafe code in the .NET framework. The core of the analysis is a new numerical abstract domain, Strp, which is used to efficiently compute memory invariants. Strp is combined with lightweight abstract domains to raise the precision, yet achieving scalability. We implemented this analysis in Clousot, a generic static analyzer for .NET. In combination with contracts expressed in FoxTrot, an MSIL based annotation language for .NET, our analysis provides static safety guarantees on memory accesses in unsafe code. We tested it on all the assemblies of the .NET framework. We compare our results with those obtained using existing domains, showing how they are either too imprecise ( e.g. , Intervals or Octagons) or too expensive (Polyhedra) to be used in practice.