Analyzing Catastrophic Backtracking Behavior in Practical Regular Expression Matching
Formal Languages and Automata Theory
2014-05-23 v1
Abstract
We develop a formal perspective on how regular expression matching works in Java, a popular representative of the category of regex-directed matching engines. In particular, we define an automata model which captures all the aspects needed to study such matching engines in a formal way. Based on this, we propose two types of static analysis, which take a regular expression and tell whether there exists a family of strings which makes Java-style matching run in exponential time.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1405.5599,
title = {Analyzing Catastrophic Backtracking Behavior in Practical Regular Expression Matching},
author = {Martin Berglund and Frank Drewes and Brink van der Merwe},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1405.5599},
year = {2014}
}
Comments
In Proceedings AFL 2014, arXiv:1405.5272