Software validation via scalable path-sensitive value flow analysis

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we present a new algorithm for tracking the flow of values through a program. Our algorithm represents a substantial improvement over the state of the art. Previously described value flow analyses that are control-flow sensitive do not scale well, nor do they eliminate value flow information from infeasible execution paths (i.e., they are path-insensitive). Our algorithm scales to large programs, and it is path-sensitive.The efficiency of our algorithm arises from three insights: The value flow problem can be "bit-vectorized" by tracking the flow of one value at a time; dataflow facts from different execution paths with the same value flow information can be merged; and information about complex aliasing that affects value flow can be plugged in from a different analysis.We have incorporated our analysis in ESP, a software validation tool. We have used ESP to validate the Windows operating system kernel (a million lines of code) against an important security property. This experience suggests that our algorithm scales to large programs, and is accurate enough to trace the flow of values in real code.

REFERENCES

• 1: Alfred V. Aho , Ravi Sethi , Jeffrey D. Ullman, Compilers: principles, techniques, and tools, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1986
• 2: Alex Aiken , Jeffrey S. Foster , John Kodumal , Tachio Terauchi, Checking and inferring local non-aliasing, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2003 conference on Programming language design and implementation, June 09-11, 2003, San Diego, California, USA
• 3: Ken Ashcraft , Dawson Engler, Using Programmer-Written Compiler Extensions to Catch Security Holes, Proceedings of the 2002 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, p.143, May 12-15, 2002
• 4: Thomas Ball , Sriram K. Rajamani, Automatically validating temporal safety properties of interfaces, Proceedings of the 8th international SPIN workshop on Model checking of software, p.103-122, May 2001, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
• 5: Rastisalv Bodík , Sadun Anik, Path-sensitive value-flow analysis, Proceedings of the 25th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages, p.237-251, January 19-21, 1998, San Diego, California, United States [doi>10.1145/268946.268966]
• 6: Marius Bozga , Radu Iosif , Yassine Laknech, Storeless semantics and alias logic, Proceedings of the 2003 ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Partial evaluation and semantics-based program manipulation, p.55-65, June 07-07, 2003, San Diego, California, USA
• 7: William R. Bush , Jonathan D. Pincus , David J. Sielaff, A static analyzer for finding dynamic programming errors, Software—Practice & Experience, v.30 n.7, p.775-802, June 2000 [doi>10.1002/(SICI)1097-024X(200006)30:7<775::AID-SPE309>3.0.CO;2-H]
• 8: Ramkrishna Chatterjee , Barbara G. Ryder , William A. Landi, Relevant context inference, Proceedings of the 26th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages, p.133-146, January 20-22, 1999, San Antonio, Texas, United States [doi>10.1145/292540.292554]
• 9: Manuvir Das, Unification-based pointer analysis with directional assignments, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2000 conference on Programming language design and implementation, p.35-46, June 18-21, 2000, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
• 10: Manuvir Das , Sorin Lerner , Mark Seigle, ESP: path-sensitive program verification in polynomial time, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2002 Conference on Programming language design and implementation, June 17-19, 2002, Berlin, Germany
• 11: Manuvir Das , Ben Liblit , Manuel Fähndrich , Jakob Rehof, Estimating the Impact of Scalable Pointer Analysis on Optimization, Proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Static Analysis, p.260-278, July 16-18, 2001
• 12: Robert DeLine , Manuel Fähndrich, Enforcing high-level protocols in low-level software, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2001 conference on Programming language design and implementation, p.59-69, June 2001, Snowbird, Utah, United States
• 13: N. Dor, S. Adams, M. Das, and Z. Yang. Path sensitive value flow analysis on large programs. Technical Report MSR-TR-2003-58, Microsoft Research, 2003.
• 14: Cormac Flanagan , K. Rustan M. Leino , Mark Lillibridge , Greg Nelson , James B. Saxe , Raymie Stata, Extended static checking for Java, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2002 Conference on Programming language design and implementation, June 17-19, 2002, Berlin, Germany
• 15: Jeffrey S. Foster , Tachio Terauchi , Alex Aiken, Flow-sensitive type qualifiers, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2002 Conference on Programming language design and implementation, June 17-19, 2002, Berlin, Germany
• 16: David Gries, The Science of Programming, Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., Secaucus, NJ, 1987
• 17: Seth Hallem , Benjamin Chelf , Yichen Xie , Dawson Engler, A system and language for building system-specific, static analyses, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2002 Conference on Programming language design and implementation, June 17-19, 2002, Berlin, Germany
• 18: Nevin Heintze , Olivier Tardieu, Ultra-fast aliasing analysis using CLA: a million lines of C code in a second, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2001 conference on Programming language design and implementation, p.254-263, June 2001, Snowbird, Utah, United States
• 19: Michael Hind, Pointer analysis: haven't we solved this problem yet?, Proceedings of the 2001 ACM SIGPLAN-SIGSOFT workshop on Program analysis for software tools and engineering, p.54-61, June 2001, Snowbird, Utah, United States [doi>10.1145/379605.379665]
• 20: Michael Hind , Anthony Pioli, Evaluating the effectiveness of pointer alias analyses, Science of Computer Programming, v.39 n.1, p.31-55, Jan. 2001 [doi>10.1016/S0167-6423(00)00014-9]
• 21: Susan Horwitz , Thomas Reps , David Binkley, Interprocedural slicing using dependence graphs, ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), v.12 n.1, p.26-60, Jan. 1990 [doi>10.1145/77606.77608]
• 22: Neil D. Jones , Steven S. Muchnick, Flow analysis and optimization of LISP-like structures, Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN symposium on Principles of programming languages, p.244-256, January 29-31, 1979, San Antonio, Texas [doi>10.1145/567752.567776]
• 23: Uday P. Khedker , Dhananjay M. Dhamdhere, A generalized theory of bit vector data flow analysis, ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), v.16 n.5, p.1472-1511, Sept. 1994 [doi>10.1145/186025.186043]
• 24: J. Knoop and B. Steffen. Efficient and optimal bit-vector dataflow analyses: A uniform interprocedural framework. Technical Report Bericht Nr. 9309, Institut für Informatik und Praktische Mathematik, Christian-Albrechts-Universität Kiel, Germany, 1993.
• 25: Ana Milanova , Atanas Rountev , Barbara G. Ryder, Precise Call Graphs for C Programs with Function Pointers, Automated Software Engineering, v.11 n.1, p.7-26, January 2004 [doi>10.1023/B:AUSE.0000008666.56394.a1]
• 26: Thomas Reps , Susan Horwitz , Mooly Sagiv, Precise interprocedural dataflow analysis via graph reachability, Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages, p.49-61, January 23-25, 1995, San Francisco, California, United States [doi>10.1145/199448.199462]
• 27: Mooly Sagiv , Thomas Reps , Reinhard Wilhelm, Parametric shape analysis via 3-valued logic, Proceedings of the 26th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages, p.105-118, January 20-22, 1999, San Antonio, Texas, United States [doi>10.1145/292540.292552]
• 28: Marc Shapiro, II , Susan Horwitz, The Effects of the Presision of Pointer Analysis, Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Static Analysis, p.16-34, September 08-10, 1997
• 29: Olin Grigsby Shivers, Control-flow analysis of higher-order languages of taming lambda, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 1991
• 30: Bjarne Steensgaard, Points-to analysis in almost linear time, Proceedings of the 23rd ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages, p.32-41, January 21-24, 1996, St. Petersburg Beach, Florida, United States [doi>10.1145/237721.237727]
• 31: Robert P. Wilson , Monica S. Lam, Efficient context-sensitive pointer analysis for C programs, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1995 conference on Programming language design and implementation, p.1-12, June 18-21, 1995, La Jolla, California, United States

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.4 Software/Program Verification

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.5 Testing and Debugging

General Terms:
Algorithms, Reliability, Verification

Keywords:
alias analysis, path-sensitive analysis, value flow