Dynamic Object Process Graph Extraction for Program Understanding and Protocol Recovery

An object process graph (OPG) is a view on the control flow graph from the perspective of a single object. Such a graph can be extracted using static or dynamic program analysis. Similar to program slicing, OPG extraction is an enabling technique with applications in many reverse engineering tasks. This Ph.D. thesis is about dynamic extraction of such OPGs and their application for program understanding and protocol recovery. In a first step, the author introduced methods for online and offline construction of dynamic OPGs, supporting different languages. The second step is the further transformation and application of the resulting graphs. The goal of this thesis is to show how they can be used for program comprehension and protocol recovery, and that these two approaches are really beneficial