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Concept
Program analysis
Summary
In computer science, program analysis is the process of automatically analyzing the behavior of computer programs regarding a property such as correctness, robustness, safety and liveness.
Program analysis focuses on two major areas: program optimization and program correctness. The first focuses on improving the program’s performance while reducing the resource usage while the latter focuses on ensuring that the program does what it is supposed to do.
Program analysis can be performed without executing the program (static program analysis), during runtime (dynamic program analysis) or in a combination of both.
Static program analysis
In the context of program correctness, static analysis can discover vulnerabilities during the development phase of the program. These vulnerabilities are easier to correct than the ones found during the testing phase since static analysis leads to the root of the vulnerability.
Due to many forms of static analysis being computationally undecidable, the mechanisms for doing it will not always terminate with the right answer either because they sometimes return a false negative ("no problems found" when the code does in fact have problems) or a false positive, or because they never return the wrong answer but sometimes never terminate. Despite their limitations, the first type of mechanism might reduce the number of vulnerabilities, while the second can sometimes give strong assurance of the lack of a certain class of vulnerabilities.
Incorrect optimizations are highly undesirable. So, in the context of program optimization, there are two main strategies to handle computationally undecidable analysis:
An optimizer that is expected to complete in a relatively short amount of time, such as the optimizer in an optimizing compiler, may use a truncated version of an analysis that is guaranteed to complete in a finite amount of time, and guaranteed to only find correct optimizations.
Official source
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