Proceedings of the 20th Static Analysis Symposium

Static analysis is increasingly recognized as a fundamental tool for program verification, bug detection, compiler optimization, program understanding, and software maintenance. The series of Static Analysis Symposia has served as the primary venue for the presentation of theoretical, practical, and application advances in the area.

This year’s symposium, the 20th International Static Analysis Symposium (SAS 2013), was held on June 19-21, 2013, in Seattle and co-located with ACM’s PLDI Conference. Three workshops were affiliated with SAS 2013: NSAD 2013 (The 5th Workshop on Numerical and Symbolic Abstract Domains) on June 19th, SASB 2013 (The 4th Workshop on Static Analysis and Systems Biology) on June 19th, and TAPAS 2013 (The 4th Workshop on Tools for Automatic Program Analysis) on June 19th.

We received 78 abstract and in the end 56 complete paper submissions. Each submission was reviewed on average by 3.2 program committee members. The committee decided to accept 23 papers.

This year, for the first time, SAS invited the submission of virtual machine artifacts in support of submitted papers. We received 22 such VMs. Out of the 23 accepted papers, 11 have associated VMs. During the review process we used the VMs only in order to lend additional support to papers, not to detract from their acceptance. The VMs are archived on http://staticanalysis.org/ as a scientific record of the state of the art at this point in time and they will hopefully serve as a comparison base for future research.

We were able to secure three invited talks by Eric Lippert (Coverity) on “The Psychology of C# Analysis”, Eric Goubault (CEA) on “Static Analysis by Abstract Interpretation of Numerical Programs and Systems, and FLUCTUAT”, and Sriram Sankaranarayanan (University of Colorado) on “Static analysis in the continuously changing world”.

We would like to thank the program committee and all the external reviewers for their participation in the reviewing process.

We are grateful for the generous sponsorship by Microsoft Research. Our thanks go out to David Schmidt and Hans Boehm for organizing the co-location with PLDI, to Manuel Hermenegildo for help with hosting the VMs, and to the EasyChair team for the use of their very handy system.