Symbolic analysis via semantic reinterpretation

The paper presents a novel technique to create implementations of the basic primitives used in symbolic program analysis: forward symbolic evaluation, weakest liberal precondition , and symbolic composition . We used the technique to create a system in which, for the cost of writing just one specification—an interpreter for the programming language of interest—one obtains automatically generated, mutually-consistent implementations of all three symbolic-analysis primitives. This can be carried out even for languages with pointers and address arithmetic. Our implementation has been used to generate symbolic-analysis primitives for the x86 and PowerPC instruction sets.