Dereference the reference manual

Null dereference is a commonly occurring defect in Java programs, and many static-analysis tools identify such defects. However, most of the existing tools perform a limited interprocedural analysis. In this paper, we present an interprocedural path-...

This paper addresses the challenging problem of verifying the safety of pointer dereferences in real Java programs. We provide an automatic approach to this problem based on a sound interprocedural analysis. We present a staged expanding-scope algorithm ...

Null dereferences are a bane of programming in languages such as Java. In this paper we propose a sound, demand-driven, inter-procedurally context-sensitive dataflow analysis technique to verify a given dereference as safe or potentially unsafe. Our ...