Article

Path-Sensitive Inference of Function Precedence Protocols

Authors:

Murali Krishna Ramanathan,

Suresh JagannathanAuthors Info & Claims

ICSE '07: Proceedings of the 29th international conference on Software Engineering

Pages 240 - 250

https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE.2007.63

Published: 24 May 2007 Publication History

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.

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Wei MHarzevili NHuang YYang JWang JWang SRoychoudhury APaiva AAbreu RStorey M(2024)Demystifying and Detecting Misuses of Deep Learning APIsProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3597503.3639177(1-12)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
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Mahmoud MWalker RDenzinger J(2024)API usage templates via structural generalizationJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2024.111974210:COnline publication date: 1-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.jss.2024.111974
Marcilio DFuria C(2023)Lightweight precise automatic extraction of exception preconditions in java methodsEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-023-10392-x29:1Online publication date: 26-Dec-2023
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Index Terms

Path-Sensitive Inference of Function Precedence Protocols
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software development techniques
    2. Software verification and validation
      1. Software defect analysis
        Software testing and debugging
  2. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language features
        Procedures, functions and subroutines

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cover image ACM Conferences

ICSE '07: Proceedings of the 29th international conference on Software Engineering

May 2007

784 pages

ISBN:0769528287

Sponsors

SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering

Publisher

IEEE Computer Society

United States

Publication History

Published: 24 May 2007

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Overall Acceptance Rate 276 of 1,856 submissions, 15%

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3597503.3639177
Mahmoud MWalker RDenzinger J(2024)API usage templates via structural generalizationJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2024.111974210:COnline publication date: 1-Apr-2024
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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10664-023-10392-x
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Ren XYe XXing ZXia XXu XZhu LSun JGrundy JLe Goues CLo D(2020)API-misuse detection driven by fine-grained API-constraint knowledge graphProceedings of the 35th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1145/3324884.3416551(461-472)Online publication date: 21-Dec-2020
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