ExChain is a static/dynamic analysis tool aimed at pinpointing the root cause of failures resulting from exception propagation.

Writing Java is just like my current mood, exceptions everywhere, making me lose even the courage to try. -- ChatGPT4

Tech Detail

Please read our paper: ExChain: Exception Dependency Analysis for Root Cause Diagnosis

Prerequest

Different dependencies/applications use different versions of Java🤯. To smooth the build process, we use jenv to provide some hints. Please make sure you have Java 8, Java 11, and Java >16 installed.

Build

• To build ExChain and benchmark applications you need to download all dependencies.

git submodule update --init --recursive

• ExChain uses JVMTi to monitor exceptions in the application. To build the JVMTi plugin:

./gradlew :native:build

• ExChain uses Phosphor to perform dynamic taint tracking and uses TaintDroid to perform static taint tracking. Unfortunately none of those tools work smoothly for large applications such as Hadoop 🥲. We have to fork them and add patches.

• Our build script will configure and build them for you:

./gradlew :native:createShadow

Benchmark Applications

Now you can use ExChain to analyze failures in applications! We have provided testing harness for 11 failures. They are located in the applications folder. Each folder represents a failure. E.g. folder fineract-1211 contains the issue FINERACT-1211. Note that this folder contains issues that wasn't successfully reproduced.

To find all reproducable issues, you may look at scripts in applications/scripts folder. Files with name {application}_{issue_id} represent a harness script that reproduce the failure. You may look at the script to understand how each application is compiled and executed.

We also provide a script that help you to run those applications with ExChain directly

cd applications/scripts
python3 runner.py --help

For example, if you are interested in wicket-6908:

python3 runner.py wicket_6908 build
python3 runner.py wicket_6908 instrument # only need for full dynamic taint analysis
python3 runner.py wicket_6908 run --type [type]

Here with type you can have: origin|static|hybrid|dynamic.

After running, the results are located in the folder applications/wicket-6908/[type]-results/{datetime}/. For static you will see affected-var-results.json, exception.json. For hybrid and dynamic you will see affected-var-results.json, dynamic_dependency.json, exception.json.

For static and hybrid, you may also want to use static taint analysis:

python3 runner.py wicket_6908 analyze --type [type]

Results

• exception.json: this file contains the basic information of all exceptions thrown during the execution.
• affected-var-results.json: this file contains the affected and responsible var analysis results for each exception thrown during the execution.
• dynamic_dependency.json: this file contains exception chain analysis results using dynamic/hybrid taint analysis.
• dependency.json: this file contains exception chain results using static taint analysis.