Andrea Flexeder, Michael Petter and Helmut Seidl. Side-Effect Analysis of Assembly Code. 18th International Symposium on Static Analysis, pages 77-94, Venice, Italy, 2011.

In this paper we present a light-weight interprocedural side-effect analysis on assembly code. We represent the modifying potential of a procedure $f$ by classifying all write accesses, occurring within $f$, relative to the parameter registers. In particular our approach is the first to accurately handle reference parameters. We demonstrate the usefulness of this approach by integrating this analysis into our assembly analyser and provide an evaluation of the precision of our approach. Approximately $50$ per cent of all procedures can be statically shown to have side-effects.

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