Program specialization and verification using file format specifications

Programs that process data that reside in files are widely used in varied domains, such as banking, healthcare, and web-traffic analysis. Precise static analysis of these programs in the context of software transformation and verification tasks is a challenging problem. Our key insight is that static analysis of file-processing programs can be made more useful if knowledge of the input file formats of these programs is made available to the analysis. We instantiate this idea to solve two practical problems - specializing the code of a program to a given “restricted” input file format, and verifying if a program “conforms” to a given input file format. We then discuss an implementation of our approach, and also empirical results on a set of real and realistic programs. The results are very encouraging in the terms of both scalability as well as precision of the approach.