A practical string analyzer by the widening approach

Abstract

The static determination of approximated values of string expressions has many potential applications. For instance, approximated string values may be used to check the validity and security of generated strings, as well as to collect the useful string properties. Previous string analysis efforts have been focused primarily on the maxmization of the precision of regular approximations of strings. These methods have not been completely satisfactory due to the difficulties in dealing with heap variables and context sensitivity. In this paper, we present an abstract-interpretation-based solution that employs a heuristic widening method. The presented solution is implemented and compared to JSA. In most cases, our solution gives results as precise as those produced by previous methods, and it makes the additional contribution of easily dealing with heap variables and context sensitivity in a very natural way. We anticipate the employment of our method in practical applications.