Shape Analysis by Refining on Abstract Evaluation Path 1

This paper presents a novel method for shape analysis, which can deal with complex expressions in C language. It supports taking addresses of fields and stack variables. The concept of abstract evaluation path (AEP) is proposed, which is generated from the expression in the language. AEP is used to refine the abstract shape graph (ASG) to get a set of more precise ASGs, on which the semantics of the statement can be defined easily. The results can be used to determine “shape invariants” and detect memory leak conservatively. A prototype has been implemented and the results of the experiment are shown.