Analysis of Java Programs Using Bytecode Based Frameworks

Java SDG(System dependence Graph) API and JOANA (Java Object-sensitive Analysis) are two bytecode based analysis frameworks available for analyzing object oriented java programs for different applications. In the present era, the continuous evolution of the customer expectations and requirements has resulted in the increase of size of the software. This arises the problems in maintaining software. Both the frameworks i.e Java SDG API and Joana consist of different variety of analysis techniques which are based on dependence graph generation and computation of slices of an input program. In our work, we make a comparative analysis study on the effectiveness and efficiency of both these above mentioned analysis frameworks in generating the corresponding intermediate dependence graph and computing slices. The dependence graph we have generated is SDG and we have used backward slicing approach in order to compute slices. The two-phase graph reachability algorithm is used in our work in case of Java SDG API in order to perform slicing. The two web start applications are used in order to generate and view SDG in case of Joana which are IFC console and Joana graph viewer. The analysis is based on the bytecode of the program under consideration. The experimental analysis shows that Joana can be extended for more diverse applications

An efficient, parametric fixpoint algorithm for analysis of java bytecode

Abstract interpretation has been widely used for the analysis of object-oriented languages and, in particular, Java source and bytecode. However, while most existing work deals with the problem of flnding expressive abstract domains that track accurately the characteristics of a particular concrete property, the underlying flxpoint algorithms have received comparatively less attention. In fact, many existing (abstract interpretation based—) flxpoint algorithms rely on relatively inefHcient techniques for solving inter-procedural caligraphs or are speciflc and tied to particular analyses. We also argüe that the design of an efficient fixpoint algorithm is pivotal to supporting the analysis of large programs. In this paper we introduce a novel algorithm for analysis of Java bytecode which includes a number of optimizations in order to reduce the number of iterations. The algorithm is parametric -in the sense that it is independent of the abstract domain used and it can be applied to different domains as "plug-ins"-, multivariant, and flow-sensitive. Also, is based on a program transformation, prior to the analysis, that results in a highly uniform representation of all the features in the language and therefore simplifies analysis. Detailed descriptions of decompilation solutions are given and discussed with an example. We also provide some performance data from a preliminary implementation of the analysis

Symbolic and analytic techniques for resource analysis of Java bytecode

Recent work in resource analysis has translated the idea of amortised resource analysis to imperative languages using a program logic that allows mixing of assertions about heap shapes, in the tradition of separation logic, and assertions about consumable resources. Separately, polyhedral methods have been used to calculate bounds on numbers of iterations in loop-based programs. We are attempting to combine these ideas to deal with Java programs involving both data structures and loops, focusing on the bytecode level rather than on source code

Verification of Java Bytecode using Analysis and Transformation of Logic Programs

State of the art analyzers in the Logic Programming (LP) paradigm are nowadays mature and sophisticated. They allow inferring a wide variety of global properties including termination, bounds on resource consumption, etc. The aim of this work is to automatically transfer the power of such analysis tools for LP to the analysis and verification of Java bytecode (JVML). In order to achieve our goal, we rely on well-known techniques for meta-programming and program specialization. More precisely, we propose to partially evaluate a JVML interpreter implemented in LP together with (an LP representation of) a JVML program and then analyze the residual program. Interestingly, at least for the examples we have studied, our approach produces very simple LP representations of the original JVML programs. This can be seen as a decompilation from JVML to high-level LP source. By reasoning about such residual programs, we can automatically prove in the CiaoPP system some non-trivial properties of JVML programs such as termination, run-time error freeness and infer bounds on its resource consumption. We are not aware of any other system which is able to verify such advanced properties of Java bytecode

Sawja: Static Analysis Workshop for Java

Static analysis is a powerful technique for automatic verification of programs but raises major engineering challenges when developing a full-fledged analyzer for a realistic language such as Java. This paper describes the Sawja library: a static analysis framework fully compliant with Java 6 which provides OCaml modules for efficiently manipulating Java bytecode programs. We present the main features of the library, including (i) efficient functional data-structures for representing program with implicit sharing and lazy parsing, (ii) an intermediate stack-less representation, and (iii) fast computation and manipulation of complete programs

Towards a General Framework for Formal Reasoning about Java Bytecode Transformation

Program transformation has gained a wide interest since it is used for several purposes: altering semantics of a program, adding features to a program or performing optimizations. In this paper we focus on program transformations at the bytecode level. Because these transformations may introduce errors, our goal is to provide a formal way to verify the update and establish its correctness. The formal framework presented includes a definition of a formal semantics of updates which is the base of a static verification and a scheme based on Hoare triples and weakest precondition calculus to reason about behavioral aspects in bytecode transformationComment: In Proceedings SCSS 2012, arXiv:1307.802

A Model-Derivation Framework for Software Analysis

Model-based verification allows to express behavioral correctness conditions like the validity of execution states, boundaries of variables or timing at a high level of abstraction and affirm that they are satisfied by a software system. However, this requires expressive models which are difficult and cumbersome to create and maintain by hand. This paper presents a framework that automatically derives behavioral models from real-sized Java programs. Our framework builds on the EMF/ECore technology and provides a tool that creates an initial model from Java bytecode, as well as a series of transformations that simplify the model and eventually output a timed-automata model that can be processed by a model checker such as UPPAAL. The framework has the following properties: (1) consistency of models with software, (2) extensibility of the model derivation process, (3) scalability and (4) expressiveness of models. We report several case studies to validate how our framework satisfies these properties.Comment: In Proceedings MARS 2017, arXiv:1703.0581

Provably Correct Control-Flow Graphs from Java Programs with Exceptions

We present an algorithm to extract flow graphs from Java bytecode, focusing on exceptional control flows. We prove its correctness, meaning that the behaviour of the extracted control-flow graph is an over-approximation of the behaviour of the original program. Thus any safety property that holds for the extracted control-flow graph also holds for the original program. This makes control-flow graphs suitable for performing different static analyses. For precision and efficiency, the extraction is performed in two phases. In the first phase the program is transformed into a BIR program, where BIR is a stack-less intermediate representation of Java bytecode; in the second phase the control-flow graph is extracted from the BIR representation. To prove the correctness of the two-phase extraction, we also define a direct extraction algorithm, whose correctness can be proven immediately. Then we show that the behaviour of the control-flow graph extracted via the intermediate representation is an over-approximation of the behaviour of the directly extracted graphs, and thus of the original program

JVM-hosted languages: They talk the talk, but do they walk the walk?

The rapid adoption of non-Java JVM languages is impressive: major international corporations are staking critical parts of their software infrastructure on components built from languages such as Scala and Clojure. However with the possible exception of Scala, there has been little academic consideration and characterization of these languages to date. In this paper, we examine four nonJava JVM languages and use exploratory data analysis techniques to investigate differences in their dynamic behavior compared to Java. We analyse a variety of programs and levels of behavior to draw distinctions between the different programming languages. We briefly discuss the implications of our findings for improving the performance of JIT compilation and garbage collection on the JVM platform