Efficient and Expressive Bytecode-Level Instrumentation for Java Programs

TL;DR

This paper introduces BISM, a lightweight, high-level bytecode instrumentation tool for Java that enables flexible, context-aware program monitoring with low overhead, supporting build-time and load-time modes.

Contribution

The paper presents BISM, a novel bytecode instrumentation framework with an expressive control-flow-aware language and collision detection, enhancing Java program monitoring capabilities.

Findings

Low runtime overhead demonstrated in experiments

Supports static and dynamic context information

Effective in security, financial, and verification scenarios

Abstract

We present an efficient and expressive tool for the instrumentation of Java programs at the bytecode-level. BISM (Bytecode-Level Instrumentation for Software Monitoring) is a light-weight Java bytecode instrumentation tool that features an expressive high-level control-flow-aware instrumentation language. The language is inspired by the aspect-oriented programming paradigm in modularizing instrumentation into separate transformers, that encapsulate joinpoint selection and advice inlining. BISM allows capturing joinpoints ranging from bytecode instructions to methods execution and provides comprehensive static and dynamic context information. It runs in two instrumentation modes: build-time and load-time. BISM also provides a mechanism to compose transformers and automatically detect their collision in the base program. Transformers in a composition can control the visibility of their advice and other instructions from the base program. We show several example applications for BISM and demonstrate its effectiveness using three experiments: a security scenario, a financial transaction system, and a general runtime verification case. The results show that BISM instrumentation incurs low runtime and memory overheads.