Pointer Analysis – A Survey 1 Introduction Pointer analysis has been studied for over two decades. It answers the following question – For variables of pointer types, what are the set of objects they may point to at runtime. The analysis is also called Points-to analysis. Pointer analysis is used in a variety of applications, including live variable analysis for register allocation and constant propagation, static checking of potential runtime errors, such as NULL pointer dereferencing and for applications such as static schedulers that need to track resource allocations and usage precisely. In recent times it has been used in the context of detecting buffer overruns and print format string violations, that are known gateways that compromise security. Similar to other static techniques, pointer analysis is plagued by decidability issues and any solution found is always an approximation for most languages. This document...
