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Static Analysis of Endian Portability by Abstract Interpretation

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Static Analysis (SAS 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 12913))

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Abstract

We present a static analysis of endian portability for C programs. Our analysis can infer that a given program, or two syntactically close versions thereof, compute the same outputs when run with the same inputs on platforms with different byte-orders, a.k.a. endiannesses. We target low-level C programs that abuse C pointers and unions, hence rely on implementation-specific behaviors undefined in the C standard.

Our method is based on abstract interpretation, and parametric in the choice of a numerical abstract domain. We first present a novel concrete collecting semantics, relating the behaviors of two versions of a program, running on platforms with different endiannesses. We propose a joint memory abstraction, able to infer equivalence relations between little- and big-endian memories. We introduce a novel symbolic predicate domain to infer relations between individual bytes of the variables in the two programs, which has near-linear cost, and the right amount of relationality to express (bitwise) arithmetic properties relevant to endian portability. We implemented a prototype static analyzer, able to scale to large real-world industrial software, with zero false alarms.

This work is performed as part of a collaborative partnership between Sorbonnne Université/CNRS (LIP6) and Airbus. This work is partially supported by the European Research Council under the Consolidator Grant Agreement 681393 – MOPSA.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Airbus Operations S.A.S., 316 route de Bayonne, 31060, Toulouse Cedex 9, France

    David Delmas

  2. Sorbonne Université, CNRS, LIP6, 75005, Paris, France

    David Delmas, Abdelraouf Ouadjaout & Antoine Miné

  3. Institut Universitaire de France, 1 rue Descartes, 75231, Paris Cedex 5, France

    Antoine Miné

Authors
  1. David Delmas
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  2. Abdelraouf Ouadjaout
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  3. Antoine Miné
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Correspondence to David Delmas .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Informal Systems, Inria, ENS, DI - Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France

    Cezara Drăgoi

  2. Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA, USA

    Suvam Mukherjee

  3. Nokia Bell Labs, Murray Hill, NJ, USA

    Kedar Namjoshi

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Delmas, D., Ouadjaout, A., Miné, A. (2021). Static Analysis of Endian Portability by Abstract Interpretation. In: Drăgoi, C., Mukherjee, S., Namjoshi, K. (eds) Static Analysis. SAS 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12913. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88806-0_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88806-0_5

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-88806-0

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