Free Online Seminar | Tit for Tat: How (not) to bully a static analysis tool

Modern static analysis tools are able to spot a large number of critical runtime defects such as null pointer dereferences, overflows, uses of uninitialized memory and divisions by zero, by using advanced techniques like Abstract Interpretation.

Since the applied analyses necessarily overapproximate the behaviour of a program, they also might report false positives, i.e. program locations at which a reported defect never occurs during runtime of the program, but the analysis cannot exclude a defect at this location for sure. As issue reports usually induce manual review or rework of the code, it is highly desirable to keep the number of false positives small.

In this free online seminar we show examples of coding patterns that make the life of a static analysis tool complicated and might cause an increase of false positives. We investigate examples of numerical computations and usages of memory-related constructs that are difficult to analyze and investigate challenging control flow constructs. As an example from practice we take a look at the implementation of a message-passing primitive and check how well it can be analyzed. Vice versa, we also point out ways to avoid the painful patterns and to make life easier for the analysis tool (and consequently, its users).

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