Effective static analysis to find concurrency bugs in Java

Abstract

Multithreading and concurrency are core features of the Java language. However, writing a correct concurrent program is notoriously difficult and error prone. Therefore, developing effective techniques to find concurrency bugs is very important. Existing static analysis techniques for finding concurrency bugs either sacrifice precision for performance, leading to many false positives, or require sophisticated analysis that incur significant overhead. In this paper, we present a precise and efficient static concurrency bugs detector building upon the Eclipse JDT and the open source WALA toolkit (which provides advanced static analysis capabilities). Our detector uses different implementation strategies to consider different types of concurrency bugs. We either utilize JDT to syntactically examine source code, or leverage WALA to perform inter-procedural data flow analysis. We describe a variety of novel heuristics and enhancements to existing analysis techniques which make our detector more practical, in terms of accuracy and performance. We also present an effective approach to use WALA for complex inter-procedural data flow analysis. Finally we justify our claims by presenting the results of applying our detector to a range of real-world applications and comparing our detector with other tools. © 2010 IEEE.