Paper Info
Title
Systematic evaluation of the unsoundness of call graph construction algorithms for Java.
Abstract
Call graphs are at the core of many static analyses ranging from the detection of unused methods to advanced control-and data-flow analyses. Therefore, a comprehensive understanding of the precision and recall of the respective graphs is crucial to enable an assessment which call-graph construction algorithms are suited in which analysis scenario. For example, malware is often obfuscated and tries to hide its intent by using Reflection. Call graphs that do not represent reflective method calls are, therefore, of limited use when analyzing such apps. In general, the precision is well understood, but the recall is not, i.e., in which cases a call graph will not contain any call edges. In this paper, we discuss the design of a comprehensive test suite that enables us to compute a fingerprint of the unsoundness of the respective call-graph construction algorithms. This suite also enables us to make a comparative evaluation of static analysis frameworks. Comparing Soot and WALA shows that WALA currently has better support for new Java 8 features and also for Java Reflection. However, in some cases both fail to include expected edges.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1145/3236454.3236503
ISSTA/ECOOP Workshops
Keywords
DocType
ISBN
call-graph construction, static analysis, soundiness
Conference
978-1-4503-5939-9
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
3
0.38
0
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Michael Reif1212.38
Florian Kübler283.17
Michael Eichberg334828.34
Mira Mezini43171211.04