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Tracking Load-Time Configuration Options

Max Lillack,Christian Kästner,E. Bodden

Published 2014 in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering

ABSTRACT

Many software systems are highly configurable, despite the fact that configuration options and their interactions make those systems significantly harder to understand and maintain. In this work, we consider load-time configuration options, such as parameters from the command-line or from configuration files. They are particularly hard to reason about: tracking configuration options from the point at which they are loaded to the point at which they influence control-flow decisions is tedious and error-prone, if done manually. We design and implement Lotrack, an extended static taint analysis to track configuration options automatically. Lotrack derives a configuration map that explains for each code fragment under which configurations it may be executed. An evaluation on Android apps and Java applications from different domains shows that Lotrack yields high accuracy with reasonable performance. We use Lotrack to empirically characterize how much of the implementation of Android apps depends on the platform's configuration options or interactions of these options.

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