Jinn: synthesizing dynamic bug detectors for foreign language interfaces

Programming language specifications mandate static and dynamic analyses to preclude syntactic and semantic errors. Although individual languages are usually well-specified, composing languages is not, and this poor specification is a source of many errors in multilingual programs. For example, virtually all Java programs compose Java and C using the Java Native Interface (JNI). Since JNI is informally specified, developers have difficulty using it correctly, and current Java compilers and virtual machines (VMs) inconsistently check only a subset of JNI constraints. This paper’s most significant contribution is to show how to synthesize dynamic analyses from state machines to detect foreign function interface (FFI) violations. We identify three classes of FFI constraints encoded by eleven state machines that capture thousands of JNI and Python/C FFI rules. We use a mapping function to specify which state machines, transitions, and program entities (threads, objects, references)...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: PLDI
• Authors: Byeongcheol Lee, Ben Wiedermann, Martin Hirzel, Robert Grimm, Kathryn S. McKinley
• Keywords: FFI Bugs, FFI Constraints, PLDI 2010, State Machine