Refining the Pointer Analysis by Exploiting Constraints on the CFL-Paths

The pointer analysis finds out what a pointer points to in a program. This analysis is useful in static program analysis, bug detection, source navigations and so on. We propose an approach to generate new constraints for one points-to and we use the constraints to refine it. The constraints can be used to refine other program analysis as well. This new constraints are based on the sequencings among the edges on a CFL-path. We propose algorithms to compute the sequencing relations for a CFL-path. Based on the news constraints, we propose a method to check the context-sensitivity of a points to by checking whether there is a trace of the C program satisfying the sequencing relations. We implement our approach in a proto-type tool called TCPA to evaluate the efficiency of our approach. Our approach can be useful in static program analysis, source code bug detection and source code understanding.