Static analysis of dynamic scripting languages
Paul Biggar, David P. Gregg · 2009
Scripting languages, such as PHP, are among the most widely used and fastest growing programming languages, particularly for web applications. Static analysis is an important tool for detecting security flaws, finding bugs, and improving compilation of programs. However, static analysis of scripting languages is difficult due to features found in languages such as PHP. These features include run-time code generation, dynamic weak typing, dynamic aliasing, implicit object and array creation, and overloading of simple operators. We find that as a result, simple analysis techniques such as SSA and def-use chains are not straight-forward to use, and that a single unconstrained variable can ruin our analysis. In this paper we describe a static analyser for PHP, and show how classical static analysis techniques can be extended to analyse PHP. In particular our analysis combines alias analysis, type-inference and constantpropagation for PHP, computing results that are essential for other analyses and optimizations. We find that this combination of techniques allows the generation of meaningful and useful results from our static analysis. 1. Motivation In recent years the importance of dynamic scripting languages — such as PHP, Python, Ruby and Javascript — has grown as they are used for an increasing amount of software development. Scripting languages provide high-level language features, a fast compilemodify-test environment for rapid prototyping, strong integration with database and web development systems, and extensive standard libraries. PHP powers many of the most popular web applications such as Facebook, Wikipedia and Yahoo. In general, there is a trend towards writing an increasing amount of an application in a scripting language rather than in a traditional programming language, not least to avoid the complexity of crossing between