The paper proposes a new static analysis designed to handle open programs, i.e., fragments of programs, with dynamic pointer-linked data structures - in particular, various kinds of lists - that employ advanced low-level pointer operations. The goal is to allow such programs be analysed without a need of writing analysis harnesses that would first initialise the structures being handled. The approach builds on a special flavour of separation logic and the approach of bi-abduction. The code of interest is analyzed along the call tree, starting from its leaves, with each function analysed just once without any call context, leading to a set of contracts summarizing the behaviour of the analysed functions. In order to handle the considered programs, methods of abduction existing in the literature are significantly modified and extended in the paper. The proposed approach has been implemented in a tool prototype and successfully evaluated on not large but complex programs.

Abstract This paper concentrates on improvements of the PredatorHP shape analyzer in the past two years, including, e.g., improved handling of interval-sized memory regions or new support of memory reallocation. The paper characterizes PredatorHP’s participation in SV-COMP 2020, pointing out its strengths and weakness and the way they were influenced by the latest changes in the tool.