Static Analysis in Disjunctive Numerical Domains

The convexity of numerical domains such as polyhedra, octagons, intervals and linear equalities enables tractable analysis of software for buffer overflows, null pointer dereferences and floating point errors. However, convexity also causes the analysis to fail in many common cases. Powerset extensions can remedy this shortcoming by considering disjunctions of predicates. Unfortunately, analysis using powerset domains can be exponentially more expensive as compared to analysis on the base domain. In this paper, we prove structural properties of fixed points computed in commonly used powerset extensions. We show that a fixed point computed on a powerset extension is also a fixed point in the base domain computed on an “elaboration” of the program’s CFG structure. Using this insight, we build analysis algorithms that approach path sensitive static analysis algorithms by performing the fixed point computation on the base domain while discovering an “elaboration” on the fly. Using restrictions on the nature of the elaborations, we design algorithms that scale polynomially in terms of the number of disjuncts. We have implemented a light-weight static analyzer as a part of the F-Soft project with encouraging initial results.