Practical API Protocol Checking with Access Permissions

  • Authors:

  • Kevin Bierhoff;Nels E. Beckman;Jonathan Aldrich

  • Affiliations:

  • Institute for Software Research, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA PA 15213;Institute for Software Research, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA PA 15213;Institute for Software Research, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA PA 15213

  • Venue:
  • Genoa Proceedings of the 23rd European Conference on ECOOP 2009 --- Object-Oriented Programming
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Reusable APIs often define usage protocols. We previously developed a sound modular type system that checks compliance with typestate-based protocols while affording a great deal of aliasing flexibility. We also developed Plural, a prototype tool that embodies our approach as an automated static analysis and includes several extensions we found useful in practice. This paper evaluates our approach along the following dimensions: (1) We report on experience in specifying relevant usage rules for a large Java standard API with our approach. We also specify several other Java APIs and identify recurring patterns. (2) We summarize two case studies in verifying third-party open-source code bases with few false positives using our tool. We discuss how tool shortcomings can be addressed either with code refactorings or extensions to the tool itself. These results indicate that our approach can be used to specify and enforce real API protocols in practice.