Collaborative Research: SHF: Small: A General Framework for Responsive Static Analysis

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Society increasingly relies on the reliability and security of software. Abstract interpretation is a well-established methodology for proving that software is free of certain classes of bugs. However, for industrial-scale software, standard abstract interpretation techniques may take hours to complete, making them difficult to integrate into modern software development practices. This project develops a framework for responsive static analysis, which retains the power of abstract interpretation while running much more quickly for common use cases. The project's novelties are new algorithms for running abstract interpretation responsively, corresponding mathematical proofs that these algorithms produce the desired, correct results, and working implementations of the algorithms. The project's impacts are greater performance and applicability of powerful abstract interpretation techniques for verifying software correctness, which in turn will yield more reliable and secure software.The project builds on a recently-developed framework for demanded abstract interpretation, a demand-driven and incremental analysis approach based on reifying analysis computations and dependencies in a graph structure. Via generalizations of this approach, this project will extend the framework to handle compositional analysis, essential for efficient analysis of procedure calls, and refinement-based analysis, to enable combining analyses with varying levels of precision and scalability. This generalized framework will facilitate provable guarantees of from-scratch consistency, a crucial property for responsive analysis. The project will also implement the generalized framework and instantiate it with challenging analysis problems, addressing research challenges in making the framework practical.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.