Abstract
Dynamic programming languages, such as PHP, JavaScript, and Python, provide built-in data structures including associative arrays and objects with similar semantics - object properties can be created at run-time and accessed via arbitrary expressions. While a high level of security and safety of applications written in these languages can be of a particular importance (consider a web application storing sensitive data and providing its functionality worldwide), dynamic data structures pose significant challenges for data-flow analysis making traditional static verification methods both unsound and imprecise.
In this paper, we propose a sound and precise approach for value and points-to analysis of programs with associative arrays-like data structures, upon which data-flow analyses can be built. We implemented our approach in a web-application domain - in an analyzer of PHP code.