2007-hav-mm.md

plugin: "jessie"
authors: "Yannick Moy and Claude Marché"
title: "Inferring local (non-)aliasing and strings for memory safety"
book: "Proceedings of Heap Analysis and Verification (HAV)"
link: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/250763933_Inferring_Local_NonAliasing_and_Strings_for_Memory_Safety_1
year: 2007
category: foundational

We propose an original approach for checking memory safety of C pointer programs, by combining deductive verification and abstract interpretation techniques. The approach is modular and contextual, thanks to the use of Hoare-style annotations (pre- and postconditions), allowing us to verify each C function independently. Deductive verification is used to check these annotations in a sound way. Abstract interpretation techniques are used to automatically generate such annotations, in an idiomatic way: standard practice of C programming is identified and incorporated as heuristics. Our first contribution is a set of techniques for identifying aliasing and strings, which we do in a local setting rather than through a global analysis as it is done usually. Our separation analysis in particular is a totally new treatment of non-aliasing. We present for the first time two abstract lattices to deal with local pointer aliasing and local pointer non-aliasing in an abstract interpretation framework. Our second contribution is the design of an abstract domain for implications, which makes it possible to build efficient contextual analyses. Our last contribution is an efficient back-and-forth propagation method to generate contextual annotations in a modular way, in the framework of abstract interpretation. We implemented our method in Caduceus, a tool for the verification of C programs, and successfully generated appropriate annotations for the C standard string library functions.