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Active learning of points-to specifications

Published: 11 June 2018 Publication History

Abstract

When analyzing programs, large libraries pose significant challenges to static points-to analysis. A popular solution is to have a human analyst provide points-to specifications that summarize relevant behaviors of library code, which can substantially improve precision and handle missing code such as native code. We propose Atlas, a tool that automatically infers points-to specifications. Atlas synthesizes unit tests that exercise the library code, and then infers points-to specifications based on observations from these executions. Atlas automatically infers specifications for the Java standard library, and produces better results for a client static information flow analysis on a benchmark of 46 Android apps compared to using existing handwritten specifications.

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  1. Active learning of points-to specifications

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    Published In

    cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices
    ACM SIGPLAN Notices  Volume 53, Issue 4
    PLDI '18
    April 2018
    834 pages
    ISSN:0362-1340
    EISSN:1558-1160
    DOI:10.1145/3296979
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    • cover image ACM Conferences
      PLDI 2018: Proceedings of the 39th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation
      June 2018
      825 pages
      ISBN:9781450356985
      DOI:10.1145/3192366
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 11 June 2018
    Published in SIGPLAN Volume 53, Issue 4

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    Author Tags

    1. specification inference
    2. static points-to analysis

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