Work

C-2PO: A Weakly Relational Pointer Domain: “These Are Not the Memory Cells You Are Looking For”

Year: 2024

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: Pointer analysis is foundational for statically analyzing real-world programs. We present C-2PO — a weakly relational domain for C programs, which tracks must-equalities and -disequalities between pointer expressions. This domain captures address arithmetic and its confinement to single memory objects, both core concepts in C. We implement the domain in Goblint and provide a preliminary evaluation. For 95% of SV-COMP tasks, the slowdown incurred by adding C-2PO is below a factor of 3. To measure precision, we instrumented coreutil programs with assertions computed by C-2PO. For an existing non-relational pointer analysis, 80% of the assertions are out of reach.

DOI: 10.1145/3689609.3689994

Authors: Rebecca Ghidini, Julian Erhard, Michael Schwarz, Helmut Seidl

Institutions: Technical University of Munich, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

Language: English

Topic: Logic, programming, and type systems

Subfield: Artificial Intelligence

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: gold

OpenAlex ID: W4403491007

FWCI: 0.294

Cites: 24

Cited by: 1

Related to: 10