Adaptive Online Program Analysis: Concepts, Infrastructure, and Applications

Dynamic analysis of state-based properties is being applied to problems such as validation, intrusion detection, and program steering and reconfiguration. Dynamic analysis of such properties, however, is used rarely in practice due to its associated run-time overhead that causes multiple orders of magnitude slowdown of program execution. In this paper, we present an approach for exploiting the state-fullness of specifications to reduce the cost of dynamic program analysis. With our approach, the results of the analysis are guaranteed to be identical to those of the traditional, expensive dynamic analyses, yet with overheads between 23% and 33% relative to the un-instrumented application, for a range of non-trivial analyses. We describe the principles behind our adaptive online program analysis technique, extensions to our Java run-time analysis framework that support such analyses, and report on the performance and capabilities of two different families of adaptive online program analyses