Efficient hybrid typestate analysis by determining continuation-equivalent states

• Authors: Eric Bodden
• Venue: Proceedings of the 32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 1
• Year: 2010

Typestate analysis determines whether a program violates a set of finite-state properties. Because the typestate-analysis problem is statically undecidable, researchers have proposed a hybrid approach that uses residual monitors to signal property violations at runtime. We present an efficient novel static typestate analysis that is flow-sensitive, partially context-sensitive, and that generates residual runtime monitors. To gain efficiency, our analysis uses precise, flow-sensitive information on an intra-procedural level only, and models the remainder of the program using a flow-insensitive pointer abstraction. Unlike previous flow-sensitive analyses, our analysis uses an additional backward analysis to partition states into equivalence classes. Code locations that transition between equivalent states are irrelevant and require no monitoring. As we show in this work, this notion of equivalent states is crucial to obtaining sound runtime monitors. We proved our analysis correct, implemented the analysis in the Clara framework for typestate analysis, and applied it to the DaCapo benchmark suite. In half of the cases, our analysis determined exactly the property-violating program points. In many other cases, the analysis reduced the number of instrumentation points by large amounts, yielding significant speed-ups during runtime monitoring.