Scalable Fault Detection Based on Precise Access Path

Abstract

Precise static analysis is necessary for an industrial environment to ensure reliability and security, which is usually field-sensitive and inter-procedural. However, it faces the problem of insufficient scale capability when being applied to various industrial environments: (1) Field-sensitive analysis can not assure termination if field accesses are modeled by unbounded access paths; (2) Inter-procedural analysis may lead to path explosion problems because of the unbounded length of call chains. While using longer access paths or call chains can improve precision, the analysis may have poor performance in terms of efficiency. Specifically, an industry-strength method should be scalable enough to face different applications. This paper presents a scalable fault detection method based on the precise access path. Precise access path models a memory location with accurate operations and offsets from a source. Points-to relations of variables are used to refine it. It can differentiate elements of aggregate structures and is more precise than the ordinary access path. Based on the precise access path, we perform an inter-procedural analysis with the help of an intra-procedural analysis and combined function summary. Furthermore, our method is designed backward to detect error handling bugs. Compared with the state-of-the-art tools, our method is more scalable, with higher precision and efficiency on both benchmarks and 11 widely-used applications.