SafeType: detecting type violations for type‐basedalias analysis of C. (15th December 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Ireland, Iain; Amaral, José Nelson; Silvera, Raúl; Cui, Shimin
• Is Part Of: Software, practice & experience. Volume 46:Number 11(2016)
• Page Start: 1571
• Page End: 1588
• Publication Date: 2015-12-15
• Subjects: type‐based analysis -- alias analysis -- type safety; Computer software -- Periodicals; Computer programming -- Periodicals; Computer programs -- Periodicals; 005.3
• DOI: 10.1002/spe.2388
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0038-0644

Abstract

Summary: To improve the ability of compilers to determine alias relations in a program, the C standard restricts the types of expressions that may access objects in memory. In practice, however, many existing C programs do not conform to these restrictions, making type‐based alias analysis unsound for those programs. As a result, type‐based alias analysis is frequently disabled. Existing approaches for verifying type safety exist within larger frameworks designed to verify overall memory safety, requiring both static analysis and runtime checks. This paper describes the motivation for analyzing the safety of type‐based alias analysis independently; presents SafeType, a purely static approach to detection of violations of the C standard's restrictions on memory accesses; describes an implementation of SafeType in the IBM XL C compiler, with flow‐sensitive and context‐sensitive queries to handle variables with typevoid * ; evaluates that implementation, showing that it scales to programs with hundreds of thousands of lines of code; and uses SafeType to identify a previously unreported violation in the470.lbm benchmark in SPEC CPU2006. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.