Data-driven context-sensitivity for points-to analysis

Abstract

We present a new data-driven approach to achieve highly cost-effective context-sensitive points-to analysis for Java. While context-sensitivity has greater impact on the analysis precision and performance than any other precision-improving techniques, it is difficult to accurately identify the methods that would benefit the most from context-sensitivity and decide how much context-sensitivity should be used for them. Manually designing such rules is a nontrivial and laborious task that often delivers suboptimal results in practice. To overcome these challenges, we propose an automated and data-driven approach that learns to effectively apply context-sensitivity from codebases. In our approach, points-to analysis is equipped with a parameterized and heuristic rules, in disjunctive form of properties on program elements, that decide when and how much to apply context-sensitivity. We present a greedy algorithm that efficiently learns the parameter of the heuristic rules. We implemented our approach in the Doop framework and evaluated using three types of context-sensitive analyses: conventional object-sensitivity, selective hybrid object-sensitivity, and type-sensitivity. In all cases, experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms existing techniques.