Violist

A String analysis framework for Java and Android apps. More algorithmic details of Violist can be found in our paper:

String analysis for Java and Android applications
Ding Li, Yingjun Lyu, Mian Wan, and William G. J. Halfond
In Proceedings of the 2015 10th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2015). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 661-672.
http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~halfond/papers/li15fse.pdf

SAND

A version of the string analysis framework customized to analyze database queries.

SAND: a static analysis approach for detecting SQL antipatterns.
Yingjun Lyu, Sasha Volokh, William G.J. Halfond and Omer Tripp.
In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA). July 2021.
Distinguished Paper Award.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3460319.3464818

Current Version

The latest version available is the version of Violist that was updated and improved for the purposes of the SAND paper.

Run

Command line: java -jar Violist.jar example/config.txt

Code: JavaAndroid ja = new JavaAndroid(androidJar,apkFolder,classlist,apkName,target,loopItr);

ja.getInterpretedValues();

Note: The parameter target is a Map<String,List<Integer>> mapping the target method signiture to the n_th string parameter. For example, the signature can be <LoggerLib.Logger: void reportString(java.lang.String, java.lang.Object, java.lang.String)>, the parameters can be <1,2>, representing the first and the second parameters that are string.

The output of ja.getInterpretedValues() is a Map<String,List<String>> mapping a string with format method_signature@bytecode_offset@n_th_string_parameter to a set of strings. The key uniquely represents a target string variable, which is passed to line bytecode_offset of the method method_signature as the n_th_string_parameter. The value represents the possible values of the string.

Build

We prefer to use eclipse or intelliJ to build the project (import an existing Maven project).

Add graphs.jar to build path.

Configuration

Main method arguments: path-to-config.txt

Structure of config.txt:

path-to-parent-folder-of-android-8      (android-8 contains an android.jar)

path-to-parent-folder-of-apk

apkName.apk

loopUnraveledTime                        (how many times loops are unraveled)

method-signature-of-hotspot1@parameter-index1@parameter-index2      (target method and target parameter index, index starts with 1)

method-signature-of-hotspot2@parameter-index1