A new static pointer dereference detecting method based on finite-state machine

A new static pointer dereference detecting method based on the finite-state machine is presented, and the definition of the finite-state machine for pointer-state transition is given. According to the semantic analysis of source codes, the point-to information is gotten and the mapping relationship between the pointers and the memory units is built up to judge whether the pointer is legal to use. This method not only records the scope and pointer sets of the variable, but also analyses point-to including the definite and the possible, which increase the efficiency of pointer dereference analysis and can detect the problems of the bad deallocation. Finally, the experimental results show that this method can detect invalid pointer dereference and bad deallocation effectively.