The dataflow pointcut: a formal and practical framework

Some security concerns are sensitive to flow of information in a program execution. The dataflow pointcut has been proposed by Masuhara and Kawauchi in order to easily implement such security concerns in aspect-oriented programming (AOP) languages. The pointcut identifies join points based on the origins of values. This paper presents a formal framework for this pointcut based on the calculus. Dataflow tags are propagated statically to track data dependencies between expressions. We introduce a static semantics for tag propagation and prove that it is consistent with respect to the dynamic semantics of the propagation. We instrument the static effect-based type system to propagate tags, match and inject advices. This static approach can be used to minimize the cost of dataflow pointcuts by reducing the runtime overhead since much of the dataflow information would be available statically and at the same time it can be used for verification. The proposed semantics for advice weaving is...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: AOSD
• Authors: Dima Alhadidi, Amine Boukhtouta, Nadia Belblidia, Mourad Debbabi, Prabir Bhattacharya
• Keywords: AOSD 2009, Dataflow Pointcut, Formal Framework, Security Concerns, Software Engineering