Towards Efficient Instrumentation for Reverse-Engineering Object Oriented Software through Static and Dynamic Analyses

Abstract

In software engineering, program analysis is usually classified according to static analysis (by analyzing source code) and dynamic analysis (by observing program executions). While static analysis provides inaccurate and imprecise results due to programming language's features (e.g., late binding), dynamic analysis produces more accurate and precise results at runtime at the expense of longer executions to collect traces.One prime mechanism to observe executions in dynamic analysis is to instrument either the code or the binary/byte code. Instrumentation overhead potentially poses a serious threat to the accuracy of the dynamic analysis, especially for time dependent software systems (e.g., real-time software), since it can cause those software systems to go out of synchronization. For instance, in a typical real-time software, the dynamic