Context-sensitive program analysis as database queries

Program analysis has been increasingly used in software engineering tasks such as auditing programs for security vulnerabilities and finding errors in general. Such tools often require analyses much more sophisticated than those traditionally used in compiler optimizations. In particular, context-sensitive pointer alias information is a prerequisite for any sound and precise analysis that reasons about uses of heap objects in a program. Context-sensitive analysis is challenging because there are over 1014 contexts in a typical large program, even after recursive cycles are collapsed. Moreover, pointers cannot be resolved in general without analyzing the entire program. This paper presents a new framework, based on the concept of deductive databases, for context-sensitive program analysis. In this framework, all program information is stored as relations; data access and analyses are written as Datalog queries. To handle the large number of contexts in a program, the database represent...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: PODS
• Authors: Monica S. Lam, John Whaley, V. Benjamin Livshits, Michael C. Martin, Dzintars Avots, Michael Carbin, Christopher Unkel
• Keywords: Context-sensitive Pointer Alias, Context-sensitive Program Analysis, Database, Datalog Queries, PODS 2005