• DOI:10.1145/2950290.2950340
• Corpus ID: 18032345

Proteus: computing disjunctive loop summary via path dependency analysis

@article{Xie2016ProteusCD,
  title={Proteus: computing disjunctive loop summary via path dependency analysis},
  author={Xiaofei Xie and Bihuan Chen and Yang Liu and Wei Le and Xiaohong Li},
  journal={Proceedings of the 2016 24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering},
  year={2016}
}

• Xiaofei Xie, Bihuan Chen, +2 authors Xiaohong Li
• Published 1 November 2016
• Computer Science
• Proceedings of the 2016 24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering

Loops are challenging structures for program analysis, especially when loops contain multiple paths with complex interleaving executions among these paths. In this paper, we first propose a classification of multi-path loops to understand the complexity of the loop execution, which is based on the variable updates on the loop conditions and the execution order of the loop paths. Secondly, we propose a loop analysis framework, named Proteus, which takes a loop program and a set of variables of interest as inputs and summarizes path-sensitive loop effects on the variables. The key contribution is to use a path dependency automaton (PDA) to capture the execution dependency between the paths. A DFS-based algorithm is proposed to traverse the PDA to summarize the effect for all feasible executions in the loop. The experimental results show that Proteus is effective in three applications: Proteus can 1) compute a more precise bound than the existing loop bound analysis techniques; 2) significantly outperform state-of-the-art tools for loop verification; and 3) generate test cases for deep loops within one second, while KLEE and Pex either need much more time or fail.