Memory safety in C by abstract interpretation

Pointer arithmetic is a core feature of the C programming language and C program analysis is impossible without an understanding of its effects. Many program analyses opt to be unsound in the presence of pointer arithmetic or preserve soundness at the cost of precision. However, the number of operations that can be performed on pointers is actually quite small. As was observed by Might et al., these few operations can be precisely modeled with a simplified Peano arithmetic. This paper presents an interpreter that uses a memory model based on this arithmetic. It desugars C programs to a simple imperative language using standard semantics-preserving techniques to simplify the interpretation. The result is a prototype analysis that reasons precisely about memory safety in full C programs without programmer annotations.