Practical AJAX Race Detection for JavaScript Web Applications

TY - GEN

T1 - Practical AJAX Race Detection for JavaScript Web Applications

AU - Adamsen, Christoffer Quist

AU - Møller, Anders

AU - Alimadadi, Saba

AU - Tip, Frank

N1 - Conference code: 26

PY - 2018/10/26

Y1 - 2018/10/26

N2 - Asynchronous client-server communication is a common source of errors in JavaScript web applications. Such errors are difficult to detect using ordinary testing because of the nondeterministic scheduling of AJAX events. Existing automated event race detectors are generally too imprecise or too inefficient to be practically useful. To address this problem,we present a newapproach based on a lightweight combination of dynamic analysis and controlled execution that directly targets identification of harmful AJAX event races. We experimentally demonstrate using our implementation, Ajax- Racer, that this approach is capable of automatically detecting harmful AJAX event races in many websites, and producing informative error messages that support diagnosis and debugging. Among 20 widely used web pages that use AJAX, AjaxRacer discovers harmful AJAX races in 12 of them, with a total of 72 error reports, and with very few false positives.

AB - Asynchronous client-server communication is a common source of errors in JavaScript web applications. Such errors are difficult to detect using ordinary testing because of the nondeterministic scheduling of AJAX events. Existing automated event race detectors are generally too imprecise or too inefficient to be practically useful. To address this problem,we present a newapproach based on a lightweight combination of dynamic analysis and controlled execution that directly targets identification of harmful AJAX event races. We experimentally demonstrate using our implementation, Ajax- Racer, that this approach is capable of automatically detecting harmful AJAX event races in many websites, and producing informative error messages that support diagnosis and debugging. Among 20 widely used web pages that use AJAX, AjaxRacer discovers harmful AJAX races in 12 of them, with a total of 72 error reports, and with very few false positives.

KW - JavaScript

KW - dynamic analysis

KW - event race detection

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85058322211&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1145/3236024.3236038

DO - 10.1145/3236024.3236038

M3 - Article in proceedings

SN - 978-1-4503-5573-5

SP - 38

EP - 48

BT - ESEC/FSE 2018 - Proceedings of the 2018 26th ACM Joint Meeting on European So ftware Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of So ftware Engineering

A2 - Leavens, Gary T.

A2 - Garcia, Alessandro

A2 - Păsăreanu, Corina S.

PB - Association for Computing Machinery

CY - New York, NY, USA

T2 - The ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE)

Y2 - 4 November 2018 through 9 November 2018

ER -