Low-Level Library Analysis and Summarization

This paper presents a method to construct summary information for a library function automatically by analyzing its low-level implementation (i.e., the library's binary), which is likely to contain errors, which may cause an analysis to return incorrect results.

Abstract

Programs typically make extensive use of libraries, including dynamically linked libraries, which are often not available in source-code form, and hence not analyzable by tools that work at source level (i.e., that analyze intermediate representations created from source code). A common approach is to write library models by hand. A library model is a collection of function stubs and variable declarations that capture some aspect of the library code's behavior. Because these are hand-crafted, they are likely to contain errors, which may cause an analysis to return incorrect results.This paper presents a method to construct summary information for a library function automatically by analyzing its low-level implementation (i.e., the library's binary).