Automatically Proving Termination and Memory Safety for Programs with Pointer Arithmetic
The work
| Authors | Thomas Ströder; Jürgen Giesl; Marc Brockschmidt; Florian Frohn; Carsten Fuhs; Jera Hensel; Peter Schneider-Kamp; Cornelius Aschermann |
|---|---|
| Editors | |
| Type | article |
| Year | 2017 |
| Citekey | stroder2017automatically |
Where it appeared
| Published in | Journal of Automated Reasoning |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Springer |
| Volume | 58 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 33--65 |
Identifiers
| DOI | 10.1007/s10817-016-9389-x |
|---|---|
| OpenAlex | W2536541088 |
Access
Abstract
While automated verification of imperative programs has been studied intensively, proving termination of programs with explicit pointer arithmetic fully automatically was still an open problem. To close this gap, we introduce a novel abstract domain that can track allocated memory in detail. We use it to automatically construct a symbolic execution graph that over-approximates all possible runs of a program and that can be used to prove memory safety. This graph is then transformed into an integer transition system, whose termination can be proved by standard techniques. We implemented this approach in the automated termination prover AProVE and demonstrate its capability of analyzing C programs with pointer arithmetic that existing tools cannot handle.
A copy is held
pdf, 547.9 kB. Not published — it may be under copyright. The facts and links here are.
How it got here
| How it got here | agent via openalex |
|---|---|
| Added | 2026-08-05 00:00 UTC |
| Approved by | a person 2026-08-16 15:30 UTC |
Filed under
Cite it as
@article{stroder2017automatically,
title = {Automatically Proving Termination and Memory Safety for Programs with Pointer Arithmetic},
author = {Thomas Ströder and Jürgen Giesl and Marc Brockschmidt and Florian Frohn and Carsten Fuhs and Jera Hensel and Peter Schneider-Kamp and Cornelius Aschermann},
year = {2017},
journal = {Journal of Automated Reasoning},
publisher = {Springer},
volume = {58},
number = {1},
pages = {33--65},
doi = {10.1007/s10817-016-9389-x},
}
This record lives at https://refs.drheap.org/stroder2017automatically/ and will keep doing so.