An empirical evaluation of static, dynamic, and hybrid slicing of WebAssembly binaries

IF 3.7 2区计算机科学 Q1 COMPUTER SCIENCE, SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

Journal of Systems and Software Pub Date : 2025-04-23 DOI:10.1016/j.jss.2025.112453

Quentin Stiévenart , David Binkley , Coen De Roover

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

The WebAssembly standard aims to form a portable compilation target, enabling the cross-platform distribution of programs written in a variety of languages. This paper introduces and evaluates novel slicing approaches for WebAssembly, including dynamic and hybrid approaches. Given a program and a location in that program, a program slice is a reduced program that preserves the behavior at the given location. A static slice does so for all possible inputs, while a dynamic slice does so for a fixed set of inputs. Hybrid slicing is a combination of static and dynamic slicing.

We build on Observational-Based Slicing (ORBS), where we explore the design space for instantiating ORBS for WebAssembly. For example, ORBS can be applied to the whole program or to only the function containing the slicing criterion, and it can be applied before compilation to WebAssembly or afterwards. We evaluate the slices produced using various options quantitatively and qualitatively. Our evaluation reveals that dynamic slicing at the level of a function from a WebAssembly binary finds a sweet spot in terms of slice time and slice size, and that a combination of static and dynamic slicers achieves the best trade-off in terms of slicing time and slice size.

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WebAssembly二进制文件的静态、动态和混合切片的经验评估

WebAssembly标准旨在形成一个可移植的编译目标，使用各种语言编写的程序能够跨平台分发。本文介绍并评价了WebAssembly的切片方法，包括动态切片方法和混合切片方法。给定一个程序和该程序中的一个位置，程序片是一个简化的程序，它保留了给定位置的行为。静态切片对所有可能的输入都这样做，而动态切片则对一组固定的输入这样做。混合切片是静态切片和动态切片的结合。我们以基于观察的切片（ORBS）为基础，在那里我们探索了为WebAssembly实例化ORBS的设计空间。例如，ORBS可以应用于整个程序，也可以只应用于包含切片标准的函数，它可以在WebAssembly编译之前或之后应用。我们定量和定性地评估使用各种选项产生的切片。我们的评估表明，在WebAssembly二进制文件的函数级别上进行动态切片在切片时间和切片大小方面找到了一个最佳点，而静态和动态切片器的组合在切片时间和切片大小方面实现了最佳权衡。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Journal of Systems and Software 工程技术-计算机：理论方法

CiteScore

8.60

自引率

5.70%

发文量

193

审稿时长

16 weeks

期刊介绍： The Journal of Systems and Software publishes papers covering all aspects of software engineering and related hardware-software-systems issues. All articles should include a validation of the idea presented, e.g. through case studies, experiments, or systematic comparisons with other approaches already in practice. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: •Methods and tools for, and empirical studies on, software requirements, design, architecture, verification and validation, maintenance and evolution •Agile, model-driven, service-oriented, open source and global software development •Approaches for mobile, multiprocessing, real-time, distributed, cloud-based, dependable and virtualized systems •Human factors and management concerns of software development •Data management and big data issues of software systems •Metrics and evaluation, data mining of software development resources •Business and economic aspects of software development processes The journal welcomes state-of-the-art surveys and reports of practical experience for all of these topics.