Characterizing and Detecting Program Representation Faults of Static Analysis Frameworks
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Static analysis frameworks (SAFs) such as Soot and WALA have been a fundamental support in today’s software analysis. They usually adopt various analysis techniques to transform programs into different representations which imply specific properties, e.g., call graph can demonstrate the calling relationships between methods in a program, and users rely on these program representations for further analysis like vulnerability detection and privacy leakage recognition. Hence, providing proper program representation is essential for SAFs. We conducted a systematic empirical study on program representation faults of static analysis frameworks. In our study, we first collect 141 issues from four popular SAFs and summarize their root causes, symptoms, and fix strategies, and reveal nine findings and some implications to avoid and detect program representation faults. Additionally, we implemented an automated testing framework named SAScope based on the metamorphic and differential testing motivated by findings and implications. Overall, SAScope can detect 19 program representation faults where 6 of them have been confirmed or fixed, demonstrating its effectiveness.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it