Path-Sensitive Inference of Function Precedence Protocols

  • Authors:

  • Murali Krishna Ramanathan;Ananth Grama;Suresh Jagannathan

  • Affiliations:

  • Purdue University;Purdue University;Purdue University

  • Venue:
  • ICSE '07 Proceedings of the 29th international conference on Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Function precedence protocols define ordering relations among function calls in a program. In some instances, precedence protocols are well-understood (e.g., a call to pthread mutex init must always be present on all program paths before a call to pthread mutex lock ). Oftentimes, however, these protocols are neither well-documented, nor easily derived. As a result, protocol violations can lead to subtle errors that are difficult to identify and correct. In this paper, we present CHRONICLER, a tool that applies scalable inter-procedural path-sensitive static analysis to automatically infer accurate function precedence protocols. CHRONICLER computes precedence relations based on a program's control-flow structure, integrates these relations into a repository, and analyzes them using sequence mining techniques to generate a collection of feasible precedence protocols. Deviations from these protocols found in the program are tagged as violations, and represent potential sources of bugs. We demonstrate CHRONICLER's effectiveness by deriving protocols for a collection of benchmarks ranging in size from 66K to 2M lines of code. Our results not only confirm the existence of bugs in these programs due to precedence protocol violations, but also highlight the importance of path sensitivity on accuracy and scalability.