Context-sensitive program analysis as database queries

Abstract

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.