Encapsulating Objects with Confined Types

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Author

Christian Grothoff, Jens Palsberg, Jan Vitek

Tech report number

CERIAS TR 2001-62

Entry type

inproceedings

Abstract

Object-oriented languages provide little support for encapsulating objects. Reference semantics allows objects to escape their defining scope. The pervasive aliasing that ensues remains a major source of software defects. This paper introduces Kacheck/J a tool for inferring object encapsulation properties in large Java programs. Our goal is to develop practical tools to assist software engineers, thus we focus on simple and scalable techniques. Kacheck/J is able to infer confinement for Java classes. A class and its subclasses are confined if all of their instances are encapsulated in their defining package. This simple property can be used to identify accidental leaks of sensitive objects. The analysis is scalable and efficient; Kacheck/J is able to infer confinement on a corpus of 46,000 classes (115 MB) in 6 minutes.

Date

2001

Booktitle

Proceedings of the 2001 ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA'01)

Key alpha

Vitek

Publisher

ACM

Affiliation

Purdue University

Publication Date

2001-01-01

Language

English

Location

A hard-copy of this is in the CERIAS Library

BibTex-formatted data

To refer to this entry, you may select and copy the text below and paste it into your BibTex document. Note that the text may not contain all macros that BibTex supports.

@Inproceedings{ Vitek,
	title = "Encapsulating Objects with Confined Types",
	author = "Christian Grothoff, Jens Palsberg, Jan Vitek",
	year = "2001",
	booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2001 ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA'01) ",
	publisher = "ACM",
	abstract = "Object-oriented languages provide little support for encapsulating objects.  Reference semantics allows objects to escape their defining scope.  The pervasive aliasing that ensues remains a major source of software defects.  This paper introduces Kacheck/J a tool for inferring object encapsulation properties in large Java programs.  Our goal is to develop practical tools to assist software engineers, thus we focus on simple and scalable techniques.  Kacheck/J is able to infer confinement for Java classes.  A class and its subclasses are confined if all of their instances are encapsulated in their defining package.  This simple property can be used to identify accidental  leaks of sensitive objects.  The analysis is scalable and efficient; Kacheck/J is able to infer confinement on a corpus of 46,000 classes (115 MB) in 6 minutes.",
	affiliation = "Purdue University",
	language = "English",
}