Domain-independent interprocedural program analysis using block-abstraction memoization

Whenever a new software-verification technique is developed, additional effort is necessary to extend the new program analysis to an interprocedural one, such that it supports recursive procedures. We would like to reduce that additional effort. Our contribution is an approach to extend an existing analysis in a modular and domain-independent way to an interprocedural analysis without large changes: We present interprocedural block-abstraction memoization (BAM), which is a technique for procedure summarization to analyze (recursive) procedures. For recursive programs, a fix-point algorithm terminates the recursion if every procedure is sufficiently unrolled and summarized to cover the abstract state space.

BAM Interprocedural works for data-flow analysis and for model checking, and is independent from the underlying abstract domain. To witness that our interprocedural analysis is generic and configurable, we defined and evaluated the approach for three completely different abstract domains: predicate abstraction, explicit values, and intervals. The interprocedural BAM-based analysis is implemented in the open-source verification framework CPAchecker. The evaluation shows that the overhead for modularity and domainindependence is not prohibitively large and the analysis is still competitive with other state-of-the-art software-verification tools.