STVL: Improve the Precision of Static Defect Detection with Symbolic Three-Valued Logic

Among various abstract domains, the interval domain is simple but also less precise. To improve the precision of static defect detection based on the interval domain, we propose a symbolic three-valued logic (STVL) based interval analysis. Our STVL differs from other symbolic techniques in that it is capable of handling the logical relationship between variables, which could help eliminating false positives. In addition, for the pointer related defect detection, we introduce a STVL-based pointer model, which naturally supports the pointer arithmetic operation, alias analysis and point-to memory abstraction. Moreover, we present a unified symbolic procedure summary model, also STVL-based, to extract the call effect of each invocation and achieve context-sensitivity. Experimental results indicate that the technique is able to achieve sizable precision improvements at reasonable costs, compared with the none-symbolic method.