This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 19th International Symposium on Static Analysis, SAS 2012, held in Deauville, France, in September 2012. The 25 revised full papers presented together with 4 invited talks were selected from 62 submissions. The papers address all aspects of static analysis, including abstract domains, abstract interpretation, abstract testing, bug detection, data flow analysis, model checking, new applications, program transformation, program verification, security analysis, theoretical frameworks, and type checking.

This monograph presents Abstract Interpretation and its use to create static analyzers that infer numeric properties on programs. Abstract Interpretation, born in the late 1970s, has proven a very effective method to construct static analyzers. It has led to successful program analysis tools like PolySpace Verifier (The Mathworks) and the Astree analyzer (AbsInt): industrial tools that are routinely used in the avionic, automotive, and space industries to help ensure the correctness of mission-critical software. Automatically inferring numeric invariants can be used to prove the absence of run-time errors, such as arithmetic overflows and out-of-bound array accesses, before the program is even run, while achieving a full coverage of the control and data space. This monograph is based on several Master-level courses in Abstract Interpretation given by the author. It is intended as an entry course in Abstract Interpretation, after which the reader should be ready to read the research literature on current advances in Abstract Interpretation, as well as more practical articles on the design of industrial-strength static analyzers for real languages.

It is well documented that fully automatic rigorous verification of complex software is very challenging and perfection is impossible. This monograph presents abstract interpretation and shows how its principles can be successfully applied to cope with the difficulties inherent to formal verification. It discusses the principles of static analysis by abstract interpretation, and reports on the automatic verification of the absence of runtime errors in large embedded aerospace software by static analysis based on abstract interpretation. The first industrial applications concerned synchronous control/command software in open loop. Recent advances consider imperfectly synchronous programs, parallel programs, and target code validation as well. Future research directions on abstract interpretation are also discussed in the context of aerospace software.