Exploiting Domain and Program Structure to Synthesize Efficient and Precise Data Flow Analyses (T)
Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Publication Date
2015
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1109/ASE.2015.41
Abstract
A key challenge in implementing an efficient and precise1 data flow analysis is determining how to abstract the domain of values that a program variable can take on and how to update abstracted values to reflect program semantics. Such updates are performed by a transfer function and recent work by Thakur, Elder and Reps [26] defined the bilateral algorithm for computing the most precise transfer function for a given abstract domain.
In this paper, we identify and exploit the special case where abstract domains are comprised of disjoint subsets. For such domains, transfer functions computed using a customized algorithm can improve performance and in combination with symbolic modeling of block-level transfer functions improve precision as well. We implemented these algorithms in Soot and used them to perform data flow analysis on more than 100 non-trivial Java methods drawn from open source projects. Our experimental data are promising as they demonstrate that a 25-fold reduction in analysis time can be achieved and precision can be increased relative to existing methods.
Publication Information
Sherman, Elena and Dwyer, Matthew B.. (2015). "Exploiting Domain and Program Structure to Synthesize Efficient and Precise Data Flow Analyses (T)". Proceedings: 2015 30th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, 608-618.