Systematic Approaches for Increasing Soundness and Precision of Static Analyzers

TY - GEN

T1 - Systematic Approaches for Increasing Soundness and Precision of Static Analyzers

AU - Andreasen, Esben Sparre

AU - Møller, Anders

AU - Nielsen, Benjamin Barslev

N1 - Conference code: 6

PY - 2017/6/18

Y1 - 2017/6/18

N2 - Building static analyzers for modern programming languages is difficult. Often soundness is a requirement, perhaps with some well-defined exceptions, and precision must be adequate for producing useful results on realistic input programs. Formally proving such properties of a complex static analysis implementation is rarely an option in practice, which raises the challenge of how to identify causes and importance of soundness and precision problems. Through a series of examples, we present our experience with semi-automated methods based on delta debugging and dynamic analysis for increasing soundness and precision of a static analyzer for JavaScript. The individual methods are well known, but to our knowledge rarely used systematically and in combination.

AB - Building static analyzers for modern programming languages is difficult. Often soundness is a requirement, perhaps with some well-defined exceptions, and precision must be adequate for producing useful results on realistic input programs. Formally proving such properties of a complex static analysis implementation is rarely an option in practice, which raises the challenge of how to identify causes and importance of soundness and precision problems. Through a series of examples, we present our experience with semi-automated methods based on delta debugging and dynamic analysis for increasing soundness and precision of a static analyzer for JavaScript. The individual methods are well known, but to our knowledge rarely used systematically and in combination.

KW - JavaScript, Soundness, Static Analysis, Testing

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85029707584&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1145/3088515.3088521

DO - 10.1145/3088515.3088521

M3 - Article in proceedings

SN - 978-1-4503-5072-3

SP - 31

EP - 36

BT - SOAP 2017 - Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on State of the Art in Program Analysis, co-located with PLDI 2017

A2 - Ali , Karim

A2 - Cifuentes , Cristina

PB - Association for Computing Machinery

CY - New York, NY, USA

T2 - ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI 2017)

Y2 - 18 June 2017 through 23 June 2017

ER -