Control flow analysis

Abstract: Preface 1. Introduction to nonlinear programming 2. Large, sparse nonlinear programming 3. Optimal control preliminaries 4. The optimal control problem 5. Optimal control examples Appendix A. Software Bibliography, Index.

Abstract: A promising technique for protecting privacy and integrity of sensitive data is to statically check information flow within programs that manipulate the data. While previous work has proposed programming language extensions to allow this static checking, the resulting languages are too restrictive for practical use and have not been implemented. In this paper, we describe the new language JFlow, an extension to the Java language that adds statically-checked information flow annotations. JFlow provides several new features that make information flow checking more flexible and convenient than in previous models: a decentralized label model, label polymorphism, run-time label checking, and automatic label inference. JFlow also supports many language features that have never been integrated successfully with static information flow control, including objects, subclassing, dynamic type tests, access control, and exceptions. This paper defines the JFlow language and presents formal rules that are used to check JFlow programs for correctness. Because most checking is static, there is little code space, data space, or run-time overhead in the JFlow implementation.

Abstract: We present an interprocedural flow-insensitive points-to analysis based on type inference methods with an almost linear time cost complexity To our knowledge, this is the asymptotically fastest non-trivial interprocedural points-to analysis algorithm yet described The algorithm is based on a non-standard type system. The type inferred for any variable represents a set of locations and includes a type which in turn represents a set of locations possibly pointed to by the variable. The type inferred for a function variable represents a set of functions It may point to and includes a type signature for these functions The results are equivalent to those of a flow-insensitive alias analysis (and control flow analysis) that assumes alias relations are reflexive and transitive.This work makes three contributions. The first is a type system for describing a universally valid storage shape graph for a program in linear space. The second is a constraint system which often leads to better results than the "obvious" constraint system for the given type system The third is an almost linear time algorithm for points-to analysis by solving a constraint system.

Abstract: Any static, global analysis of the expression and data relationships in a program requires a knowledge of the control flow of the program. Since one of the primary reasons for doing such a global analysis in a compiler is to produce optimized programs, control flow analysis has been embedded in many compilers and has been described in several papers. An early paper by Prosser [5] described the use of Boolean matrices (or, more particularly, connectivity matrices) in flow analysis. The use of “dominance” relationships in flow analysis was first introduced by Prosser and much expanded by Lowry and Medlock [6]. References [6,8,9] describe compilers which use various forms of control flow analysis for optimization. Some recent developments in the area are reported in [4] and in [7]. The underlying motivation in all the different types of control flow analysis is the need to codify the flow relationships in the program. The codification may be in connectivity matrices, in predecessor-successor tables, in dominance lists, etc. Whatever the form, the purpose is to facilitate determining what the flow relationships are; in other words to facilitate answering such questions as: is this an inner loop?, if an expression is removed from the loop where can it be correctly and profitably placed?, which variable definitions can affect this use? In this paper the basic control flow relationships are expressed in a directed graph. Various graph constructs are then found and shown to codify interesting global relationships.