Program analysis
process of automatically analyzing the behavior of computer programs regarding a property such as correctness, robustness, safety, or liveness
In computer science, program analysis is the process of 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 performing it may not always terminate with the correct answer. This can result in either false negatives ("no problems found" when the code does in fact have issues) or false positives, or because they may never return an incorrect answer but may also never terminate. Despite these limitations, static analysis can still be valuable: the first type of mechanism might reduce the number of vulnerabilities, while the second can sometimes provide strong assurance of the absence of certain classes of vulnerabilities.
Incorrect optimizations are highly undesirable.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Program analysis” as process of automatically analyzing the behavior of computer programs regarding a property such as correctness, robustness, safety, or liveness. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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This entry incorporates text from “Program analysis” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.