Checking Compliance to Coding Standards for x86 Executables

COTS component evaluation is one of the most important steps in component-based development. Enforcing the coding standard within the coding phase is one important aspect for the quality of safety-critical software. This paper addresses the problem of carrying out COTS component evaluation of its compliance to the coding standard in case when only the executables with neither source code nor debugging information are available. The static binary analysis techniques are employed to discuss the feasibilities and possible approaches of checking compliance to coding standard rules for x86 executables. This work is our known first attempt to address this problem. About 27% of the MISRA-C 2004 rules can be checked or partially checked for x86 executables. Experiments are presented to conclude that for the rules related to unstructuredness and pointer cast, violations found from executables can be a reasonable approximation of the extent of compliance to the coding standard of the corresponding source code.