[PPL-devel] [Fwd: Re: Announcing the Parma Polyhedra Library (version 0.2)]

[Roberto Bagnara]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Announcing the Parma Polyhedra Library (version 0.2)
Date: Mon, 19 Nov 2001 13:12:33 -0800 (PST)
From: David Wagner <daw at cs.berkeley.edu>
To: bagnara at cs.unipr.it (Roberto Bagnara)

Thanks much for the information!  This is the answer I sort of
expected, given what I've seen from other polyhedra libraries,
but thank you for taking the time to describe your experience.

The application that interested me is detection of buffer overrun
vulnerabilities in large C applications.  Typically one must do
a whole-program analysis, and interesting C applications tend to
have thousands of relevant integer variables and tens of thousands
of statements affecting these variables.

Several colleagues and I looked at this problem, and we used a
much less precise form of analysis to cope with the scalability
issues.  Still, this comes with significant costs: you get many
false alarms (warnings that don't correspond to real bugs), and
our experience suggests that polyhedra-style analysis could make
a big improvement in this respect.

If you're interested to read more about our work, our paper is
online at <http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~daw/papers/overruns-ndss00.ps>.
Nurit Dor, Michael Rodeh, and Mooly Sagiv have done some work on
applying polyhedra to the same problem, and they found that they
could get a much more accurate analysis, but with the disadvantage
that the result could only handle small programs.

Thanks again for your note.  I found your comments interesting,
and I'll continue to follow your progress on this project!

Regards,
-- David