Alias Analysis of Executable Code
Saumya Debray Robert Muth Matthew Weippert
Department of Computer Science
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721, U.S.A.
Abstract
Recent years have seen increasing interest in systems that reason about and
manipulate executable code. Such systems can generally benefit from
information about aliasing. Unfortunately, most existing alias analyses
are formulated in terms of high-level language features, and are unable
to cope with features, such as pointer arithmetic, that pervade executable
programs. This paper describes a simple algorithm that can be used to
obtain aliasing information for executable code.
In order to be practical, the algorithm is careful to keep its memory
requirements low, sacrificing precision where necessary to achieve this
goal. Experimental results indicate that it is nevertheless able to
provide a reasonable amount of information about memory
references across a variety of benchmark programs.