Analysis of Software Patches Using Numerical Abstract Interpretation

International audienceWe present a static analysis for software patches. Given two syntactically close versions of a program, our analysis can infer a semantic difference, and prove that both programs compute the same outputs when run on the same inputs. Our method is based on abstract interpretation, and parametric in the choice of an abstract domain. We focus on numeric properties only. Our method is able to deal with unbounded executions of infinite-state programs, reading from infinite input streams. Yet, it is limited to comparing terminating executions, ignoring non terminating ones.We first present a novel concrete collecting semantics, expressing the behaviors of both programs at the same time. Then, we propose an abstraction of infinite input streams able to prove that programs that read from the same stream compute equal output values. We then show how to leverage classic numeric abstract domains, such as polyhedra or octagons, to build an effective static analysis. We also introduce a novel numeric domain to bound differences between the values of the variables in the two programs, which has linear cost, and the right amount of relationality to express useful properties of software patches.We implemented a prototype and experimented on a few small examples from the literature. Our prototype operates on a toy language, and assumes a joint syntactic representation of two versions of a program given, which distinguishes between common and distinctive parts