The dataflow pointcut: a formal and practical framework

ABSTRACT

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 λ_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 in the spirit of AspectJ where advices are injected before, after, or around the join points that are matched by their respective pointcuts. Inspired from the formal framework, the AspectJ compiler ajc is extended with the dataflow pointcut that tracks data dependencies inside methods.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.1 Formal Definitions and Theory
          Subjects: Semantics

General Terms:
Languages, Theory

Keywords:
aspect-oriented programming, dataflow analysis, type theory