We develop a formal perspective on how regular expression matching works in
Java, a popular representative of the category of regex-directed matching
engines. In particular, we define an automata model which captures all the
aspects needed to study such matching engines in a formal way. Based on this,
we propose two types of static analysis, which take a regular expression and
tell whether there exists a family of strings which makes Java-style matching
run in exponential time.Comment: In Proceedings AFL 2014, arXiv:1405.527