Static program analysis for bug detection in industrial C/C++ code has many challenges. One of them is to analyze pointer and pointer structures efficiently. While there has been much research into various aspects of pointer analysis either for compiler optimization or for verification tasks, both classical categories are not optimized for bug detection, where speed and precision are important, but soundness (no missed bugs) and completeness (no false positives) do not necessarily need to be guaranteed.

Programming embedded system software typically involves more than one programming language. Normally, a high-level language such as C/C++ is used for application oriented tasks and a low-level assembly language for direct interaction with the underlying hardware. In most cases those languages are closely interwoven and the assembly is embedded in the C/C++ code. Verification of such programs requires the integrated analysis of both languages at the same time. However, common algorithmic verification tools fail to address this issue. In this work we present a model-checking based static analysis approach which seamlessly integrates the analysis of embedded ARM assembly with C/C++ code analysis. In particular, we show how to automatically check that the ARM code complies to its interface descriptions. Given interface compliance, we then provide an extended analysis framework for checking general properties of ARM code. We implemented this analysis in our source code analysis tool Goanna, and applied to the source code of an L4 micro kernel implementation.

Software has been under scrutiny by the verification community from various angles in the recent past. There are two major algorithmic approaches to ensure the correctness of and to eliminate bugs from such systems: software model checking and static analysis. Those approaches are typically complementary. In this paper we use a model checking approach to solve static analysis problems. This not only avoids the scalability and abstraction issues typically associated with model checking, it allows for specifying new properties in a concise and elegant way, scales well to large code bases, and the built-in optimizations of modern model checkers enable scalability also in terms of numbers of properties to be checked. In particular, we present Goanna, the first C/C++ static source code analyzer using the off-the-shelfmodel checker NuSMV, and we demonstrate Goanna's suitability for developer machines by evaluating its run-time performance, memory consumption and scalability using the source code of OpenSSL as a test bed.