A Generic Architecture for Data Flow Analysis to Support

Data flow analysis is a process for collecting run-time information about data in programs without actually executing them. In this paper, we focus at the use of data flow analysis to support program understanding and reverse engi-neering. Data flow analysis is beneficial for these applications since the information obtained can be used to compute relationships between data objects in programs. These relations play a key role, for example, in the determination of the logical components of a system and their interaction. The general support of program understanding and reverse engineering requires the ability to analyse a variety of source languages and the ability to combine the results of analysing multiple languages. We present a flexible and generic software architecture for describing and performing language-independent data flow analysis which allows such transparent multi-language analysis. All components of this architecture were formally specified