research-article

Use at your own risk: the Java unsafe API in the wild

Authors:

Luis Mastrangelo,

Luca Ponzanelli,

Matthias Hauswirth,

Nathaniel NystromAuthors Info & Claims

OOPSLA 2015: Proceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications

Pages 695 - 710

https://doi.org/10.1145/2814270.2814313

Published: 23 October 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Java is a safe language. Its runtime environment provides strong safety guarantees that any Java application can rely on. Or so we think. We show that the runtime actually does not provide these guarantees---for a large fraction of today's Java code. Unbeknownst to many application developers, the Java runtime includes a "backdoor" that allows expert library and framework developers to circumvent Java's safety guarantees. This backdoor is there by design, and is well known to experts, as it enables them to write high-performance "systems-level" code in Java. For much the same reasons that safe languages are preferred over unsafe languages, these powerful---but unsafe---capabilities in Java should be restricted. They should be made safe by changing the language, the runtime system, or the libraries. At the very least, their use should be restricted. This paper is a step in that direction. We analyzed 74 GB of compiled Java code, spread over 86,479 Java archives, to determine how Java's unsafe capabilities are used in real-world libraries and applications. We found that 25% of Java bytecode archives depend on unsafe third-party Java code, and thus Java's safety guarantees cannot be trusted. We identify 14 different usage patterns of Java's unsafe capabilities, and we provide supporting evidence for why real-world code needs these capabilities. Our long-term goal is to provide a foundation for the design of new language features to regain safety in Java.

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Auxiliary Archive (p695-mastrangelo-s.zip)

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Arvidsson ECastegren EClebsch SDrossopoulou SNoble JParkinson MWrigstad T(2023)Reference Capabilities for Flexible Memory ManagementProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36228467:OOPSLA2(1363-1393)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2023
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Sulír MChodarev SNosáľ M(2023)Outside the Sandbox: A Study of Input/Output Methods in JavaProceedings of the 27th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering10.1145/3593434.3593501(253-258)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2023
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Index Terms

Use at your own risk: the Java unsafe API in the wild
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language features

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cover image ACM Conferences

OOPSLA 2015: Proceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications

October 2015

953 pages

ISBN:9781450336895

DOI:10.1145/2814270

General Chair:
Jonathan Aldrich
Carnegie Mellon University, USA
,
Program Chair:
Patrick Eugster
Purdue University, USA

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 50, Issue 10
OOPSLA '15
October 2015
953 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/2858965
Editor:
Andy Gill
University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2015 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 23 October 2015

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SPLASH '15: Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications: Software for Humanity

October 25 - 30, 2015

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Cited By

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3620237.3620580
Arvidsson ECastegren EClebsch SDrossopoulou SNoble JParkinson MWrigstad T(2023)Reference Capabilities for Flexible Memory ManagementProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36228467:OOPSLA2(1363-1393)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3622846
Sulír MChodarev SNosáľ M(2023)Outside the Sandbox: A Study of Input/Output Methods in JavaProceedings of the 27th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering10.1145/3593434.3593501(253-258)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3593434.3593501
Chilukuri AAkram SBlackburn SPetrank E(2023)Analyzing and Improving the Scalability of In-Memory Indices for Managed Search EnginesProceedings of the 2023 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on Memory Management10.1145/3591195.3595272(15-29)Online publication date: 6-Jun-2023
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Krakowski FRuhland FSchöttner M(2023)High-Performance Object Serialization based on Ahead-of-Time Schema Generation2023 IEEE 22nd International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications (TrustCom)10.1109/TrustCom60117.2023.00335(2378-2385)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2023
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Wickert ADamke CBaumgärtner LHüllermeier EMezini M(2023)UnGoML: Automated Classification of unsafe Usages in Go2023 IEEE/ACM 20th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)10.1109/MSR59073.2023.00050(309-321)Online publication date: May-2023
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Costa DMujahid SAbdalkareem RShihab E(2022)Breaking Type Safety in Go: An Empirical Study on the Usage of the unsafe PackageIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2021.305772048:7(2277-2294)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2022
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