Precise Null Pointer Analysis Through Global Value Numbering

Abstract: Precise analysis of pointer information plays an important role in many static analysis techniques and tools today. The precision, however, must be balanced against the scalability of the analysis. This paper focusses on improving the precision of standard context and flow insensitive alias analysis algorithms at a low scalability cost. In particular, we present a semantics-preserving program transformation that drastically improves the precision of existing analyses when deciding if a pointer can alias NULL. Our program transformation is based on Global Value Numbering, a scheme inspired from compiler optimizations literature. It allows even a flow-insensitive analysis to make use of branch conditions such as checking if a pointer is NULL and gain precision. We perform experiments on real-world code to measure the overhead in performing the transformation and the improvement in the precision of the analysis. We show that the precision improves from 86.56% to 98.05%, while the overhead is insignificant.