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Pointer analysis for programs with structures and casting

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Thomas RepsAuthors Info & Claims

PLDI '99: Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1999 conference on Programming language design and implementation

Pages 91 - 103

https://doi.org/10.1145/301618.301647

Published: 01 May 1999 Publication History

Abstract

Type casting allows a program to access an object as if it had a type different from its declared type. This complicates the design of a pointer-analysis algorithm that treats structure fields as separate objects; therefore, some previous pointer-analysis algorithms "collapse" a structure into a single variable. The disadvantage of this approach is that it can lead to very imprecise points-to information. Other algorithms treat each field as a separate object based on its offset and size. While this approach leads to more precise results, the results are not portable because the memory layout of structures is implementation dependent.This paper first describes the complications introduced by type casting, then presents a tunable pointer-analysis framework for handling structures in the presence of casting. Different instances of this framework produce algorithms with different levels of precision, portability, and efficiency. Experimental results from running our implementations of four instances of this framework show that (i) it is important to distinguish fields of structures in pointer analysis, but (ii) making conservative approximations when casting is involved usually does not cost much in terms of time, space, or the precision of the results.

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Index Terms

Pointer analysis for programs with structures and casting
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language features
        Frameworks

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cover image ACM Conferences

PLDI '99: Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1999 conference on Programming language design and implementation

May 1999

304 pages

ISBN:1581130945

DOI:10.1145/301618

Chairmen:
Barbara G. Ryder
Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, NJ
,
Benjamin G. Zorn
Univ. of Colorado, Boulder, and Microsoft Research

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 34, Issue 5
May 1999
304 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/301631
Editors:
Barbara G. Ryder
Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, NJ
,
Benjamin G. Zorn
Univ. of Colorado, Boulder
,
A. Michael Berman
Rowan Univ., Glassboro, NJ
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 1999 ACM.

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Published: 01 May 1999

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PLDI99: Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation 1999

May 1 - 4, 1999

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PLDI '99 Paper Acceptance Rate 26 of 130 submissions, 20%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 406 of 2,067 submissions, 20%

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https://doi.org/10.1109/ICST53961.2022.00049
Yavuz TBai K(2020)Analyzing system software components using API model guided symbolic executionAutomated Software Engineering10.1007/s10515-020-00276-5Online publication date: 19-Sep-2020
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10515-020-00276-5
Belleville BShen WVolckaert SAzab AFranz M(2019)KALD: Detecting Direct Pointer Disclosure VulnerabilitiesIEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing10.1109/TDSC.2019.2915829(1-1)Online publication date: 2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/TDSC.2019.2915829
Hanford NAhuja VFarrens MTierney BGhosal D(2018)A Survey of End-System Optimizations for High-Speed NetworksACM Computing Surveys10.1145/318489951:3(1-36)Online publication date: 16-Jul-2018
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