The year is coming to an end, and in fact some believe so may the world, so I thought I would give everyone a recap of what we have worked on and accomplished in 2012. What an exciting year this was! Through funding by EC SPRIDE and my new Emmy Noether Group RUNSECURE, my group grew from a single PhD student to five! This was obviously quite an exciting but also challenging shift for me, coordinating such a large and new group is not an easy task – but at the end of the year I have to say that I think I am getting the hang of it.
In a collaboration with Andreas Thies from Fernuni Hagen, we were able to develop the first system that can guarantee to some decent extent the correctness of refactorings in the presence of reflective method invocations. Our Eclipse plugin RefaFlex is available for download. Our ISSTA publication on the topic received the SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award.
Around the beginning of the year we started quite fruitful collaborations with the groups of Jacques Klein and Patrick McDaniel to work on an analysis infrastructure for Android based on Soot. Alexandre Bartel has just released our current versions of a pair of Dex-to-Jimple and Jimple-to-Dex converters, which in combination allow for arbitrarily precise analyses and transformations on Dalvik bytecode. (The Jimple-to-Dex converter is a contribution by Thomas Pilot, developed as his MSc thesis.) We plan to publish interesting analyses based on this framework soon. If you are interested in playing around with it yourself, check out our development branch. Read the rest of this entry »
