Improving static analyses of C programs with conditional predicates

Extended version of the FMICS 2014 paperInternational audienceStatic code analysis is increasingly used to guarantee the absence of undesirable behaviors in industrial programs. Designing sound analyses is a continuing trade-off between precision and complexity. Notably, dataflow analyses often perform overly wide approximations when two control-flow paths meet, by merging states from each path.This paper presents a generic abstract interpretation based framework to enhance the precision of such analyses on join points. It relies on predicated domains, that preserve and reuse information valid only inside some branches of the code. Our predicates are derived from conditional statements, and postpone the loss of information.The work has been integrated into Frama-C, a C source code analysis platform. Experiments on real generated code show that our approach scales, and improves significantly the precision of the existing analyses of Frama-C

Improving static analyses of C programs with conditional predicates

Best paper awardInternational audienceStatic code analysis is increasingly used to guarantee the absence of undesirable behaviors in industrial programs. Designing sound analyses is a continuing trade-off between precision and complexity. Notably, dataflow analyses often perform overly wide approximations when two control-flow paths meet, by merging states from each path. This paper presents a generic abstract interpretation based framework to enhance the precision of such analyses on join points. It relies on predicated domains, that preserve and reuse information valid only inside some branches of the code. Our predicates are derived from conditionals statements, and postpone the loss of information. The work has been integrated into Frama-C, a C source code analysis platform. Experiments on real code show that our approach scales, and improves significantly the precision of the existing analyses of Frama-C

Proceedings of the 22nd Conference on Formal Methods in Computer-Aided Design – FMCAD 2022

The Conference on Formal Methods in Computer-Aided Design (FMCAD) is an annual conference on the theory and applications of formal methods in hardware and system verification. FMCAD provides a leading forum to researchers in academia and industry for presenting and discussing groundbreaking methods, technologies, theoretical results, and tools for reasoning formally about computing systems. FMCAD covers formal aspects of computer-aided system design including verification, specification, synthesis, and testing

Proceedings of the 22nd Conference on Formal Methods in Computer-Aided Design – FMCAD 2022

The Conference on Formal Methods in Computer-Aided Design (FMCAD) is an annual conference on the theory and applications of formal methods in hardware and system verification. FMCAD provides a leading forum to researchers in academia and industry for presenting and discussing groundbreaking methods, technologies, theoretical results, and tools for reasoning formally about computing systems. FMCAD covers formal aspects of computer-aided system design including verification, specification, synthesis, and testing