Multi-structure Objects Points-to Analysis

Abstract

An important dimension of pointer analysis is field-Sensitive, which has been proven to effectively enhance the accuracy of pointer analysis results. A crucial area of research within field-Sensitive is Structure-Sensitive. Structure-Sensitive has been shown to further enhance the precision of pointer analysis. However, existing structure-sensitive methods cannot handle cases where an object possesses multiple structures, even though it's common for an object to have multiple structures throughout its lifecycle. This paper introduces MTO-SS, a flow-sensitive pointer analysis method for objects with multiple structures. Our observation is that it's common for an object to possess multiple structures throughout its lifecycle. The novelty of MTO-SS lies in: MTO-SS introduces Structure-Flow-Sensitive. An object has different structure information at different locations in the program. To ensure the completeness of an object's structure information, MTO-SS always performs weak updates on the object's type. This means that once an object possesses a structure, this structure will accompany the object throughout its lifecycle. We evaluated our method of multi-structured object pointer analysis using the 12 largest programs in GNU Coreutils and compared the experimental results with sparse flow-sensitive method and another method, TYPECLONE, which only allows an object to have one structure information. Our experimental results confirm that MTO-SS is more precise than both sparse flow-sensitive pointer analysis and TYPECLONE, being able to answer, on average, over 22\% more alias queries with a no-alias result compared to the former, and over 3\% more compared to the latter. Additionally, the time overhead introduced by our method is very low.