Understanding software application interfaces via string analysis

In software systems, different software applications often interact with each other through specific interfaces by exchanging data in string format. For example, web services interact with each other through XML strings. Database applications interact with a database through strings of SQL statements. Sometimes these interfaces between different software applications are complex and distributed. For example, a table in a database can be accessed by multiple methods in a database application and a single method can access multiple tables. In this paper, we propose an approach to understanding software application interfaces through string analysis. The approach first performs a static analysis of source code to identify interaction points (in the form of interface-method-call sites). We then leverage existing string analysis tools to collect all possible string data that can be sent through these different interaction points. Then we manipulate collected string data by grouping similar data together. For example, we group together all collected SQL statements that access the same table. Then we associate various parts of aggregated data with interaction points in order to show the connections between entities from interacting applications. Our preliminary results show that the approach can help us understand the characteristics of interactions between database applications and databases. We also identify some challenges in this approach for our future work.