Staged Points-To Analysis for Large Code Bases

Nicholas Allen, Bernhard Scholz and Paddy Krishnan
Oracle Labs Australia

In this paper, we introduce a new points-to framework that facilitates the
computation of context-sensitive points-to analysis for large code bases. The
framework is demand-driven, i.e., a client queries the points-to information
for some program variables. The novelty of our approach is a pre-analysis
technique that is a combination of staged points-to analyses with program
slicing and program compaction. We implemented the proposed points-to
framework in Datalog for a proprietary bug checker that could identify
security vulnerabilities in the OpenJDK library. Our points-to framework
scales for code bases with millions of program variables and hundreds of
thousands of methods.