Data Flow Analysis as a General Concept for the Transport of Verifiable Program Annotations

Wolfram Amme, Marc-Andre Müller, and Philipp Adler

University of Jena, Germany

Just-in-Time (JIT) compilation is frequently employed in order to speed-up the execution of platform-independent and dynamically extensible mobile code applications. Since the time required for dynamic compilation directly influences a program's execution time, JIT compilers usually utilize only simple and fast techniques for program analysis and optimization. To improve further the analysis and optimization process of such compilers program annotations can be used.

However, mostly all current annotation approaches suffer from the fact that the verification of transmitted program information is time consuming and therefore will not be carried out on the consumer side of a mobile code system. In this paper, we present a verifiable annotation technique that is based on a well known iterative data flow algorithm and which can be used for the transmission of all program information that can be derived through data flow analysis. Preliminary measurements of compilation and verification time indicate that the presented technique seems to be implementable and therefore could be used as an all-purpose transportation technique for safe program annotations.