Continuation equivalence: a Correctness Criterion for Static Optimizations of Dynamic Analyses

Eric | May 26, 2011

Accepted for publication at WODA 2011:

Dynamic analyses reason about a program’s concrete heap and control flow and hence can report on actual program behavior with high or even perfect accuracy. But many dynamic analyses require extensive program instrumentation, often slowing down the analyzed program considerably.
In the past, researchers have hence developed specialized static optimizations that can prove instrumentation for a special analysis unnecessary at many program locations: the analysis can safely omit monitoring these locations, as their monitoring would not change the analysis results. Arguing about the correctness of such optimizations is hard, however, and ad-hoc approaches have lead to mistakes in the past.
In this paper we present a correctness criterion called Continuation Equivalence, which allows researchers to prove static optimizations of dynamic analyses correct more easily. The criterion demands that an optimization may alter instrumentation at a program site only if the altered instrumentation produces a dynamic analysis configuration equivalent to the configuration of the un-altered program with respect to all possible continuations of the control flow.
In previous work, we have used a notion of continuation-equivalent states to prove the correctness of static optimization for finite-state runtime monitors. With this work, we propose to generalize the idea to general dynamic analyses.

 

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RV Deadline extension

Eric | May 26, 2011

I am happy to let you all know that the submission deadline for RV 2011 has been extended by another week. The new deadline is June 12th.

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TamiFlex slides online

Eric | May 26, 2011

I have just put my slides for the ICSE 2011 talk on TamiFlex online. Download them here in Keynote or PDF format (large!).

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Slides from “Festschrift” for Lee Osterweil

Eric | May 25, 2011

Aloha! Today I felt very honored to be part of a honorary “Festschrift” event for Lee Osterweil. My talk was part of a session headed by Matt Dwyer, focusing on offsprings from Lee’s early work on typestate analysis. You can find my slides here in Keynote format (PDF here, large!).

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ISSTA Call for Participation

Eric | May 22, 2011

We invite you all to participate in ISSTA 2011! Read our call for participation here!

 

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Submit now to New-Ideas Track at ESEC/FSE

Eric | May 17, 2011

Submissions to the New Ideas and Emerging Results Track at ESEC/FSE are now open. We invite you to submit a 4-pages paper or a poster along with a 2-pages abstract. Submissions are due on June 12th.

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ISSTA Program is online, registration is open

Eric | May 11, 2011

Today we have put the ISSTA 2011 program online. This year, ISSTA received an all-time high number of submissions and we also accepted an all-time high number of excellent research papers. They should surely make for an interesting program.
Also, registration is open now. We hope to see you there!

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