Lossless, Persisted Summarization of Static Callgraph, Points-To and Data-Flow Analysis

Static analysis is used to automatically detect bugs and security breaches, and aids compiler optimization. Whole-program analysis (WPA) can yield high precision, however causes long analysis times and thus does not match common software-development workflows, making it often impractical to use for large, real-world applications. This paper thus presents the design and implementation of ModAlyzer, a novel static-analysis approach that aims at accelerating whole-program analysis by making the analysis modular and compositional. It shows how to compute lossless, persisted summaries for callgraph, points-to and data-flow information, and it reports under which circumstances this function-level compositional analysis outperforms WPA. We implemented ModAlyzer as an extension to LLVM and PhASAR, and applied it to 12 real-world C and C++ applications. At analysis time, ModAlyzer modularly and losslessly summarizes the analysis effect of the library code those applications share, hence avoiding its repeated re-analysis. The experimental results show that the reuse of these summaries can save, on average, 72% of analysis time over WPA. Moreover, because it is lossless, the module-wise analysis fully retains precision and recall. Surprisingly, as our results show, it sometimes even yields precision superior to WPA. The initial summary generation, on average, takes about 3.67 times as long as WPA