ABSTRACT

Exception handling is a powerful and widely-used programming language abstraction for constructing robust software systems. Unfortunately, it introduces an interprocedural flow of control that can be difficult to reason about. Failure to do so correctly can lead to security vulnerabilities, breaches of API encapsulation, and any number of safety policy violations. To address this difficulty, we present a fully automated tool that statically infers and characterizes exception-causing conditions in Java programs. The tool is based on an inter-procedural, context sensitive analysis. The output of this tool is well-suited for use as human-readable documentation of exceptional conditions. An evaluation of tool, demonstrating that is at least as good as existing documentation 85% of the time and is better 25% of the time, will be described. Additionally, the presentation will include an analysis of the existing exception documentation in several existing open source projects. Other Recent and Upcoming Colloquia