Taint analysis of manual service compositions using Cross-Application Call Graphs

Abstract

We propose an extension over the traditional call graph to incorporate edges representing control flow between web services, named the Cross-Application Call Graph (CACG). We introduce a construction algorithm for applications built on the Jax-WS standard and validate its effectiveness on sample applications from Apache CXF and JBossWS. Then, we demonstrate its applicability for taint analysis over a sample application of our making. Our CACG construction algorithm accurately identifies service call targets 81.07% of the time on average. Our taint analysis obtains a F-Measure of 95.60% over a benchmark. The use of a CACG, compared to a naive approach, improves the F-Measure of a taint analysis from 66.67% to 100.00% for our sample application.