Near-Concrete Program Interpretation

We develop a near-concrete interpretation, a program analysis that aims to cut very close to program execution while retaining decidability. Both in name and in spirit, the approach is similar to abstract interpretation, but models heaps with possibly recursive strucure, is path sensitive, and applies in a fully higher-order setting. The main technical contribution is a prune-rerun technique for analyzing higherorder recursive functions. To illustrate the expressiveness and usefulness of the system, we show how it can be used to enforce temporal program safety properties and information flow security, and show how it betters state-of-the-art systems on some examples.