Know Your Analysis: How Instrumentation Aids Understanding Static Analysis
The development of a high-quality data-flow analysis—one that is precise and scalable—is a challenging task. A concrete client analysis not only requires data-flow but, in addition, type-hierarchy, points-to, and call-graph information, all of which need to be obtained by wisely chosen and correctly parameterized algorithms. Therefore, many static analysis frameworks have been developed that provide analysis writers with generic data-flow solvers as well as those additional pieces of information. Such frameworks ease the development of an analysis by requiring only a description of the data-flow problem to be solved and a set of framework parameters. Yet, analysis writers often struggle when an analysis does not behave as expected on real-world code. It is usually not apparent what causes a failure due to the complex interplay of the several algorithms and the client analysis code within such frameworks. In this work, we present some of the insights we gained by instrumenting the LLVM-based static analysis framework PhASAR for C/C++ code and show the broad area of applications at which flexible instrumentation supports analysis and framework developers. We present five cases in which instrumentation gave us valuable insights to debug and improve both, the concrete analyses and the underlying PhASAR framework.
Sat 22 JunDisplayed time zone: Tijuana, Baja California change
09:15 - 11:00 | Performance and Optimizations for Program Analysis ToolsSOAP at 106A Chair(s): Neville Grech University of Athens | ||
09:15 20mTalk | Commit-time Incremental Analysis SOAP | ||
09:35 20mTalk | Know Your Analysis: How Instrumentation Aids Understanding Static Analysis SOAP Philipp Dominik Schubert Heinz Nixdorf Institut, Paderborn University, Richard Leer Heinz Nixdorf Institut, Paderborn University, Ben Hermann Paderborn University, Eric Bodden Heinz Nixdorf Institut, Paderborn University and Fraunhofer IEM Pre-print Media Attached | ||
09:55 20mTalk | Fixpoint Reuse for Incremental JavaScript Analysis SOAP Lawton Nichols , Mehmet Emre University of California, Santa Barbara, Ben Hardekopf UC Santa Barbara | ||
10:15 80mTalk | Program Analysis for Process Migration SOAP | ||
10:35 25mOther | Open Discussion on Previous Talks 1 SOAP |