Past-Sensitive Pointer Analysis for Symbolic Execution (Video, ESEC/FSE 2020)

"Past-Sensitive Pointer Analysis for Symbolic Execution (Video, ESEC/FSE 2020)
David Trabish, Timotej Kapus, Noam Rinetzky, and Cristian Cadar
(Tel Aviv University, Israel; Imperial College London, UK; Tel Aviv University, Israel; Imperial College London, UK)

Abstract: We propose a novel fine-grained integration of pointer analysis with
dynamic analysis, including dynamic symbolic execution. This is
achieved via past-sensitive pointer analysis, an on-demand
pointer analysis instantiated with an abstraction of the dynamic
state on which it is invoked.
We evaluate our technique in three application scenarios: chopped
symbolic execution, symbolic pointer resolution, and
write integrity testing.
Our preliminary results show that the approach can have a significant
impact in these scenarios, by effectively improving the precision of
standard pointer analysis with only a modest performance overhead.

Submitted to the conference by David Trabish on 2020-10-29

Video Tags: Symbolic Execution, Pointer Analysis, fse20main-p237-p, DOI: 10.1145/3368089.3409698, DOI: 10.1145/3410246, Artifacts Available, Artifacts Evaluated — Reusable, Artifacts Evaluated — Functional