2005 Reports

Incremental Algorithms for Inter-procedural Analysis of Safety Properties

Conway, Christopher L.; Namjoshi, Kedar S.; Dams, Dennis; Edwards, Stephen A.

Automaton-based static program analysis has proved to be an effective tool for bug finding. Current tools generally re-analyze a program from scratch in response to a change in the code, which can result in much duplicated effort. We present an inter-procedural algorithm that analyzes incrementally in response to program changes and present experiments for a null-pointer dereference analysis. It shows a substantial speed-up over re-analysis from scratch, with a manageable amount of disk space used to store information between analysis runs.