Historia: Refuting Callback Reachability with Message-History Logics
This paper considers the callback reachability problem — determining if a callback can be called by an event-driven framework in an unexpected state. Event-driven programming frameworks are pervasive for creating user-interactive applications (apps) on just about every modern platform. Control flow between callbacks is determined by the framework and largely opaque to the programmer. This opacity of the callback control flow not only causes difficulty for the programmer but is also difficult for those developing static analysis. Previous static analysis techniques address this opacity either by assuming an arbitrary framework implementation or attempting to eagerly specify all possible callback control flow, but this is either too coarse to prove properties requiring callback-ordering constraints or too burdensome and tricky to get right. Instead, we present a middle way where the callback control flow can be gradually refined in a targeted manner to prove assertions of interest. The key insight to get this middle way is by reasoning about the history of method invocations at the boundary between app and framework code — enabling a decoupling of the specification of callback control flow from the analysis of app code. We call the sequence of such boundary-method invocations message histories and develop message-history logics to do this reasoning. In particular, we define the notion of an application-only transition system with boundary transitions, a message-history program logic for programs with such transitions, and a temporal specification logic for capturing callback control flow in a targeted and compositional manner. Then to utilize the logics in a goal-directed verifier, we define a way to combine after-the-fact an assertion about message histories with a specification of callback control flow. We implemented a prototype message history-based verifier called Historia and provide evidence that our approach is uniquely capable of distinguishing between buggy and fixed versions on challenging examples drawn from real-world issues and that our targeted specification approach enables proving the absence of multi-callback bug patterns in real-world open-source Android apps.
Thu 26 OctDisplayed time zone: Lisbon change
16:00 - 17:30 | |||
16:00 18mTalk | Historia: Refuting Callback Reachability with Message-History Logics OOPSLA Shawn Meier University of Colorado at Boulder, Sergio Mover École Polytechnique, Gowtham Kaki University of Colorado at Boulder, Bor-Yuh Evan Chang University of Colorado at Boulder; Amazon DOI | ||
16:18 18mTalk | Exploiting the Sparseness of Control-Flow and Call Graphs for Efficient and On-Demand Algebraic Program Analysis OOPSLA Giovanna Kobus Conrado Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Amir Kafshdar Goharshady Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Kerim Kochekov Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Yun Chen Tsai Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Ahmed Khaled Zaher Hong Kong University of Science and Technology DOI | ||
16:36 18mTalk | A Cocktail Approach to Practical Call Graph Construction OOPSLA Yuandao Cai Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Charles Zhang Hong Kong University of Science and Technology DOI | ||
16:54 18mTalk | Building Dynamic System Call Sandbox with Partial Order Analysis OOPSLA Quan Zhang Tsinghua University, Chijin Zhou Tsinghua University, Yiwen Xu Tsinghua University, Zijing Yin Tsinghua University, Mingzhe Wang Tsinghua University, Zhuo Su Tsinghua University, Chengnian Sun University of Waterloo, Yu Jiang Tsinghua University, Jiaguang Sun Tsinghua University DOI | ||
17:12 18mTalk | Improving Oracle-Guided Inductive Synthesis by Efficient Question Selection OOPSLA Ruyi Ji Peking University, Chaozhe Kong Peking University, Yingfei Xiong Peking University, Zhenjiang Hu Peking University DOI |