Dataflow tunneling: mining inter-request data dependencies for request-based applications

Abstract

Request-based applications, e.g., most server-side applications, expose services to users in a request-based paradigm, in which requests are served by request-handler methods. An important task for request-based applications is inter-request analysis, which analyzes request-handler methods that are related by inter-request data dependencies together. However, in the request-based paradigm, data dependencies between related request-handler methods are implicitly established by the underlying frameworks that execute these methods. As a result, existing analysis tools are usually limited to the scope of each single method without the knowledge of dependencies between different methods.