Home

Welcome to the PhASAR wiki!

What is PhASAR?

PhASAR is a LLVM-based static analysis framework written in C++. It allows users to specify arbitrary data-flow problems which are then solved in a fully-automated manner on the specified LLVM IR target code. Computing points-to information, call-graph(s), etc. is done by the framework, thus you can focus on what matters.

How do I get started with PhASAR?

Moreover than the documentation on PhASAR wiki page, you probably would like to read this README and then have a look on the material provided on https://phasar.org/ as well. Please also have a look on PhASAR's project directory and notice the project directory examples/ as well as the custom tool tools/example-tool/myphasartool.cpp.

How can I get help? Wiki and Slack

If you already read the documentation on PhASAR's wiki page(s) and went through the examples and still have questions on PhASAR, LLVM, or how to write an analysis, there is a slack channel phasar.slack.com where you can get help from other PhASARists. Please send a brief email to [email protected] and we will add you to the PhASAR slack channel.

Purpose of this tool

PhASAR provides a static analysis framework that has been implemented on top of LLVM. PhASAR has been developed with the goal to make static analysis easier, more accessible. Furthermore, it tries to establish a novel platform to evaluate new concepts and ideas in the area of program analysis.

How to cite PhASAR?

Please use the following bibtex entry to cite PhASAR:

@InProceedings{10.1007/978-3-030-17465-1_22,
	author="Schubert, Philipp Dominik
	and Hermann, Ben
	and Bodden, Eric",
	editor="Vojnar, Tom{\'a}{\v{s}}	and Zhang, Lijun",
	title="PhASAR: An Inter-procedural Static Analysis Framework for C/C++",
	booktitle="Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems",
	year="2019",
	publisher="Springer International Publishing",
	address="Cham",
	pages="393--410",
	abstract="Static program analysis is used to automatically determine program properties, or to detect bugs or security vulnerabilities in programs. It can be used as a stand-alone tool or to aid compiler optimization as an intermediary step. Developing precise, inter-procedural static analyses, however, is a challenging task, due to the algorithmic complexity, implementation effort, and the threat of state explosion which leads to unsatisfactory performance. Software written in C and C++ is notoriously hard to analyze because of the deliberately unsafe type system, unrestricted use of pointers, and (for C++) virtual dispatch. In this work, we describe the design and implementation of the LLVM-based static analysis framework PhASAR for C/C++ code. PhASAR allows data-flow problems to be solved in a fully automated manner. It provides class hierarchy, call-graph, points-to, and data-flow information, hence requiring analysis developers only to specify a definition of the data-flow problem. PhASAR thus hides the complexity of static analysis behind a high-level API, making static program analysis more accessible and easy to use. PhASAR is available as an open-source project. We evaluate PhASAR's scalability during whole-program analysis. Analyzing 12 real-world programs using a taint analysis written in PhASAR, we found PhASAR's abstractions and their implementations to provide a whole-program analysis that scales well to real-world programs. Furthermore, we peek into the details of analysis runs, discuss our experience in developing static analyses for C/C++, and present possible future improvements. Data or code related to this paper is available at: [34].",
	isbn="978-3-030-17465-1"
}

The paper can be found here: Useful Literature.