C-2PO: A Weakly Relational Pointer Domain: “These Are Not the Memory Cells You Are Looking For”

Pointer analysis is foundational for statically analyzing real-world programs. We present C-2PO — a weakly relational domain for C programs, which tracks must-equalities and -disequalities between pointer expressions. This domain captures address arithmetic and its confinement to single memory objects, both core concepts in C. We implement the domain in Goblint and provide a preliminary evaluation. For 95% of SV-COMP tasks, the slowdown incurred by adding C-2PO is below a factor of 3. To measure precision, we instrumented coreutil programs with assertions computed by C-2PO. For an existing non-relational pointer analysis, 80% of the assertions are out of reach.