Subscribe to the gold package and get unlimited access to Shamra Academy
Register a new userA Critical Comparison on Six Static Analysis Tools: Detection, Agreement, and Precision
57
0
0.0
(
0
)
Added by
Valentina Lenarduzzi
Publication date
2021
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
Ask ChatGPT about the research
No Arabic abstract
Background. Developers use Automated Static Analysis Tools (ASATs) to control for potential quality issues in source code, including defects and technical debt. Tool vendors have devised quite a number of tools, which makes it harder for practitioners to select the most suitable one for their needs. To better support developers, researchers have been conducting several studies on ASATs to favor the understanding of their actual capabilities. Aims. Despite the work done so far, there is still a lack of knowledge regarding (1) which source quality problems can actually be detected by static analysis tool warnings, (2) what is their agreement, and (3) what is the precision of their recommendations. We aim at bridging this gap by proposing a large-scale comparison of six popular static analysis tools for Java projects: Better Code Hub, CheckStyle, Coverity Scan, Findbugs, PMD, and SonarQube. Method. We analyze 47 Java projects and derive a taxonomy of warnings raised by 6 state-of-the-practice ASATs. To assess their agreement, we compared them by manually analyzing - at line-level - whether they identify the same issues. Finally, we manually evaluate the precision of the tools. Results. The key results report a comprehensive taxonomy of ASATs warnings, show little to no agreement among the tools and a low degree of precision. Conclusions. We provide a taxonomy that can be useful to researchers, practitioners, and tool vendors to map the current capabilities of the tools. Furthermore, our study provides the first overview on the agreement among different tools as well as an extensive analysis of their precision.
rate research
Read More
This demo paper presents the technical details and usage scenarios of $mu$SE: a mutation-based tool for evaluating security-focused static analysis tools for Android. Mutation testing is generally used by software practitioners to assess the robustness of a given test-suite. However, we leverage this technique to systematically evaluate static analysis tools and uncover and document soundness issues. $mu$SEs analysis has found 25 previously undocumented flaws in static data leak detection tools for Android. $mu$SE offers four mutation schemes, namely Reachability, Complex-reachability, TaintSink, and ScopeSink, which determine the locations of seeded mutants. Furthermore, the user can extend $mu$SE by customizing the API calls targeted by the mutation analysis. $mu$SE is also practical, as it makes use of filtering techniques based on compilation and execution criteria that reduces the number of ineffective mutations.
Third-party libraries (TPLs) have become a significant part of the Android ecosystem. Developers can employ various TPLs to facilitate their app development. Unfortunately, the popularity of TPLs also brings new security issues. For example, TPLs may carry malicious or vulnerable code, which can infect popular apps to pose threats to mobile users. Furthermore, TPL detection is essential for downstream tasks, such as vulnerabilities and malware detection. Thus, various tools have been developed to identify TPLs. However, no existing work has studied these TPL detection tools in detail, and different tools focus on different applications and techniques with performance differences. A comprehensive understanding of these tools will help us make better use of them. To this end, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study to fill the gap by evaluating and comparing all publicly available TPL detection tools based on six criteria: accuracy of TPL construction, effectiveness, efficiency, accuracy of version identification, resiliency to code obfuscation, and ease of use. Besides, we enhance these open-source tools by fixing their limitations, to improve their detection ability. Finally, we build an extensible framework that integrates all existing available TPL detection tools, providing an online service for the research community. We release the evaluation dataset and enhanced tools. According to our study, we also present the essential findings and discuss promising implications to the community. We believe our work provides a clear picture of existing TPL detection techniques and also gives a roadmap for future research.
Wireless Body Sensor Network (WBSN) is a developing technology with constraints in energy consumption, coverage radius, communication reliability. Also, communications between nodes contain very sensitive personal information in which sometimes due to the presence of hostile environments, there are a wide range of security risks. As such, designing authenticated key agreement (AKA) protocols is an important challenge in these networks. Recently, Li et al. proposed a lightweight scheme using the hash and XOR functions which is much more efficient compared with similar schemes based on elliptic curve. However, the investigations revealed that the claim concerning the unlinkability between the sessions of a sensor node is NOT true. The present paper considers the security issues of the scheme proposed by Li et al. and some of its new extensions in order to propose a new AKA scheme with anonymity and unlinkability of the sensor node sessions. The results of theoretical analysis compared with similar schemes indicate that the proposed scheme reduces average energy consumption and average computation time by 61 percent while reduces the average communication cost by 41 percent. Further, it has been shown by formal and informal analysis that, Besides the two anonymity and unlinkability features, the other main features of the security in the proposed scheme are comparable and similar to the recent similar schemes.
A number of approaches have been proposed to identify service boundaries when decomposing a monolith to microservices. However, only a few use systematic methods and have been demonstrated with replicable empirical studies. We describe a systematic approach for refactoring systems to microservice architectures that uses static analysis to determine the systems structure and dynamic analysis to understand its actual behavior. A prototype of a tool was built using this approach (MonoBreaker) and was used to conduct a case study on a real-world software project. The goal was to assess the feasibility and benefits of a systematic approach to decomposition that combines static and dynamic analysis. The three study participants regarded as positive the decomposition proposed by our tool, and considered that it showed improvements over approaches that rely only on static analysis.
Verifiers that can prove programs correct against their full functional specification require, for programs with loops, additional annotations in the form of loop invariants---propeties that hold for every iteration of a loop. We show that significant loop invariant candidates can be generated by systematically mutating postconditions; then, dynamic checking (based on automatically generated tests) weeds out invalid candidates, and static checking selects provably valid ones. We present a framework that automatically applies these techniques to support a program prover, paving the way for fully automatic verification without manually written loop invariants: Applied to 28 methods (including 39 different loops) from various java.util classes (occasionally modified to avoid using Java features not fully supported by the static checker), our DYNAMATE prototype automatically discharged 97% of all proof obligations, resulting in automatic complete correctness proofs of 25 out of the 28 methods---outperforming several state-of-the-art tools for fully automatic verification.
Log in to be able to interact and post comments
comments
Fetching comments
Sign in to be able to follow your search criteria
