Anchor: Fast and Precise Value-flow Analysis for Containers via Memory Orientation

Containers are ubiquitous data structures that support a variety of manipulations on the elements, inducing the indirect value flows in the program. Tracking value flows through containers is stunningly difficult, because it depends on container memory layouts, which are expensive to be discovered. This work presents a fast and precise value-flow analysis framework called Anchor for the programs using containers. We introduce the notion of anchored containers and propose the memory orientation analysis to construct a precise value-flow graph. Specifically, we establish a combined domain to identify anchored containers and apply strong updates to container memory layouts. Anchor finally conducts a demand-driven reachability analysis in the value-flow graph for a client. Experiments show that it removes 17.1% spurious statements from thin slices and discovers 20 null pointer exceptions with 9.1% as its false-positive ratio, while the smashing-based analysis reports 66.7% false positives. Anchor scales to millions of lines of code and checks the program with around 5.12 MLoC within 5 hours.