DRC: a detection tool for dangling references in PHP-based web applications

  • Authors:
  • Hung Viet Nguyen;Hoan Anh Nguyen;Tung Thanh Nguyen;Tien N. Nguyen

  • Affiliations:
  • Iowa State University, USA;Iowa State University, USA;Iowa State University, USA;Iowa State University, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

PHP is a server-side language that is widely used for creating dynamic Web applications. However, as a dynamic language, PHP may induce certain programming errors that reveal themselves only at run time. A common type of error is dangling references, which occur if the referred program entities have not been declared in the current program execution. To prevent the run-time errors caused by such dangling references, we introduce Dangling Reference Checker (DRC), a novel tool to statically detect those references in the source code of PHP-based Web applications. DRC first identifies the path constraints of the program executions in which a program entity appears and then matches the path constraints of the entity's declarations and references to detect dangling ones. DRC is able to detect dangling reference errors in several real-world PHP systems with high accuracy. The video demonstration for DRC is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_AKZYhLlU4.