Improving efficiency of dynamic analysis with dynamic dependence summaries

Abstract

Modern applications make heavy use of third-party libraries and components, which poses new challenges for efficient dynamic analysis. To perform such analyses, transitive dependent components at all layers of the call stack must be monitored and analyzed, and as such may be prohibitively expensive for systems with large libraries and components. As an approach to address such expenses, we record, summarize, and reuse dynamic dataflows between inputs and outputs of components, based on dynamic control and data traces. These summarized dataflows are computed at a fine-grained instruction level; the result of which, we call "dynamic dependence summaries." Although static summaries have been proposed, to the best of our knowledge, this work presents the first technique for dynamic dependence summaries. The benefits to efficiency of such summarization may be afforded with losses of accuracy. As such, we evaluate the degree of accuracy loss and the degree of efficiency gain when using dynamic dependence summaries of library methods. On five large programs from the DaCapo benchmark (for which no existing whole-program dynamic dependence analyses have been shown to scale) and 21 versions of NANOXML, the summarized dependence analysis provided 90% accuracy and a speed-up of 100% (i.e., ×2), on average, when compared to traditional exhaustive dynamic dependence analysis.

Modelgen: mining explicit information flow specifications from concrete executions

“…Dependence analysis of some form is a prerequisite for explicit information flow analysis, since it involves determining which program values at which point in the execution are used to compute every new program value. Although our use case, and thus evaluation, is very different than that of [41], the specifications produced are somewhat related. In [41], a specification that a flows to b means literally that a location named by a is used to compute a value in a location named by b.…”

“…Although our use case, and thus evaluation, is very different than that of [41], the specifications produced are somewhat related. In [41], a specification that a flows to b means literally that a location named by a is used to compute a value in a location named by b. In our framework, a specification that a flows to b means that some value reachable from a is used to compute some value reachable from b.…”

“…Many schemes have been proposed for extracting different kinds of specifications of API methods or classes from traces of concrete executions. Closest to ours is work on producing dynamic dependence summaries of methods as a way to improve the performance of whole-program dynamic dependence analysis [41]. Dependence analysis of some form is a prerequisite for explicit information flow analysis, since it involves determining which program values at which point in the execution are used to compute every new program value.…”

“…Typically such software builds upon large and complex frameworks (e.g., Android, Apache Struts, and Spring). For soundness and precision, any analysis of such software entails analysis Dynamic analysis has been used in the past to compute dependence summaries of methods to speed up a wholeprogram dynamic dependence analysis [41]. Such summaries are related, but not identical, to the information flow specifications described in this paper (see Section 6).…”

Discriminating influences among instructions in a dynamic slice

“…A noteworthy amount of dynamic slicing research has focused on pruning, compressing and summarizing dynamic slices or dynamic dependence graphs upon which the slicing is performed to aid comprehension (e.g., [7,11,14,15,19,20,22]). An underlying motivation for such works has been to eventually support efficient navigation and inspection of dynamic slices both computationally and for manual inspection by software engineers.…”