Bit-precise procedure-modular termination analysis

Journal article

Non-termination is the root cause of a variety of program bugs, such as hanging programs and vulnerabilities to denial-of-service attacks. This makes an automated analysis that can prove the absence of such bugs highly desirable. To scale termination checks to large systems, an interprocedural termination analysis seems essential. This is a largely unexplored area of research in termination analysis, where most effort has focussed on small but difficult single-procedure problems.
We present a modular termination analysis for C programs using template-based interprocedural summarisation. Our analysis combines a context-sensitive, over-approximating forward analysis with the inference of under-approximating preconditions for termination. Bit-precise termination arguments are synthesised over lexicographic linear ranking function templates. Our experimental results show the advantage of interprocedural reasoning over monolithic analysis in terms of efficiency, while retaining comparable precision.

Authors: Chen, H; David, C; Kroening, D; Schrammel, P; Wachter, B

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery
• Journal: ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems
• Volume: 40
• Issue: 1
• Article number: 1
• Publication date: 2018-01-03
• Acceptance date: 2017-05-25
• DOI: 10.1145/3121136
• EISSN: 1558-4593
• ISSN: 0164-0925