Paper: Phoenix: A Modular and Versatile Framework for C/C++ Pointer Analysis

Abstract


We present Phoenix, a modular pointer analysis framework for C/C++
that unifies multiple state-of-the-art alias analysis algorithms
behind a single, stable interface. Phoenix addresses the fragmentation
of today's C/C++ pointer analysis ecosystem by cleanly separating IR
construction, constraint generation, solver backends, and
client-facing queries, making analyses easy to compare, swap, and
compose while exposing explicit precision-performance trade-offs. We
evaluate Phoenix against SVF under two representative configurations:
a flow- and context-insensitive setting and a more precise flow- and
context-sensitive setting, on 28 GNU coreutils programs. Phoenix
delivers robust speedups in the baseline configuration (up to 2.88x)
and remains competitive, and often faster, even in the stronger
precision regime (up to 2.91x), without a systematic runtime penalty.
In production, Phoenix serves as the analysis substrate for static
analysis and fuzzing tools that have uncovered hundreds of new bugs
and enabled deployments reporting more than 1000 bugs found in an
industrial toolchain.


https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01720


Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

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