Hierarchical shape abstraction of dynamic structures in static blocks

Abstract. We propose a hierarchical shape abstract domain, so as to infer structural invariants of dynamic structures such as lists living in-side static structures, such as arrays. This programming pattern is often used in safety critical embedded software that need to “allocate ” dy-namic structures inside static regions due to dynamic memory allocation being forbidden in this context. Our abstract domain precisely describes such hierarchies of structures. It combines several instances of simple shape abstract domains, dedicated to the representation of elementary shape properties, and also embeds a numerical abstract domain. This modular construction greatly simplifies the design and the implementa-tion of the abstract domain. We provide an implementation, and show the effectiveness of our approach on a problem taken from a real code.