Analyzing Distributed Java Applications by Automatic Centralization

The verification and analysis of distributed applications are difficult. They involve large combinational states, interactive network communication between peers, and concurrency. Some dynamic analysis tools can analyze the runtime behavior of a single-process application. However, they do not support the analysis of a whole distributed application, where multiple processes run simultaneously. Centralization is a general solution, which transforms multi-process applications into a single-process one that can be directly analyzed by such existing tools. In this paper, we adopt centralization as a general framework for analyzing distributed applications. We propose and solve the essential issue of a class version conflict during centralization. We also propose a clean solution for the shutdown semantics. We implement and apply our centralization tool to some network benchmarks. Experiments, where existing tools are used on the centralized application, support the usefulness of our automatic centralization tool. Centralization enables existing single-process tools to analyze distributed applications.