A Brief Survey of Specification Inference in Static Program Analysis

Abstract

Nowadays, many applications are too big to keep their own security. Static analysis is a technique which can be used for ensure the safety of large programs. However, frequent calls to libraries and frameworks bring a lot of difficulties to the analysis. Researchers propose the specification inference to solve the problem. We survey the recent advances in specification inference techniques and divide them into three groups by the methods they adopt which are domain specific language (DSL), data mining and abductive inference, respectively. Then we take a detailed look at the representative results in each category. It is our hope that we can see more creative achievements in this field by doing this work.