[Soot-list] Heros, our IFDS/IDE solver for Soot (and other frameworks) is now open source

[Eric Bodden]

Hi all.

I am happy to announce the availability of Heros, a new
inter-procedural data-flow solver that I developed over the past year,
presented at SOAP'12 and which I am open-sourcing now at
http://sable.github.com/heros/

Heros is based on the well-known IFDS and IDE frameworks by Reps,
Horwitz and Sagiv. It allows users to define data-flow problems in a
very simple template-based manner (see here for example): simply
define your flow functions and let the solver take care of the rest.
Other implementations of IFDS and IDE exist, for instance WALA has had
support for IFDS for quite some time. Heros has a number of unique
features, though:

- Its implementation is independent of the programming language being
analyzed and the analysis framework’s IR. We provide a connector to
Soot but other people can easily integrate Heros with other tools. We
ourselves are working on an integration with a C/C++ compiler.
- Heros is multi-threaded and hence highly scalable.
- Heros also provides a relatively simple programming interface.

If you would like to try out Heros with Soot, all you need is available here:
https://github.com/Sable/soot/tree/master/src/soot/jimple/toolkits/ide
In particular, we provide four example analysis clients.

Heros draws a lot of inspiration from the IFDS/IDE approach in WALA
and the one by Naeem/Lhotak/Rodriguez. Thanks a lot to the developers
for sharing their ideas and insights with me!

What is going to be te future of this project? I am open-sourcing this
tool in the hope that ---similar to Soot--- others will build on it,
help improve and maintain the solver, and extend it with new features,
so that we and others don't need to keep re-inventing the wheel. So if
you are willing to contribute to this project, by all means do not
hesitate to contacting me.

Best wishes,
Eric
--
Eric Bodden, Ph.D., http://sse.ec-spride.de/ http://bodden.de/
Head of Secure Software Engineering Group at EC SPRIDE
Tel: +49 6151 16-75422    Fax: +49 6151 16-72051
Room 3.2.14, Mornewegstr. 30, 64293 Darmstadt