Easing Maintenance of Academic Static Analyzers

TL;DR

This paper presents tools and techniques to simplify the maintenance of the Mopsa static analysis platform, including automated precision measurement, transparency improvements, and automated testcase reduction, to support ongoing research and development.

Contribution

It introduces novel methods for automated precision measurement, transparency enhancement, and testcase reduction tailored for academic static analyzers like Mopsa.

Findings

Automated precision measurement without true bug baselines.

Enhanced transparency and regression detection in static analysis.

Automated testcase reduction techniques.

Abstract

Academic research in static analysis produces software implementations. These implementations are time-consuming to develop and some need to be maintained in order to enable building further research upon the implementation. While necessary, these processes can be quickly challenging. This article documents the tools and techniques we have come up with to simplify the maintenance of Mopsa since 2017. Mopsa is a static analysis platform that aims at being sound. First, we describe an automated way to measure precision that does not require any baseline of true bugs obtained by manually inspecting the results. Further, it improves transparency of the analysis, and helps discovering regressions during continuous integration. Second, we have taken inspiration from standard tools observing the concrete execution of a program to design custom tools observing the abstract execution of the analyzed program itself, such as abstract debuggers and profilers. Finally, we report on some cases of automated testcase reduction.