Automated Analysis and Verification of Application Program Interfaces (APIs)

The Joint Tactical Radio System is planned to be the next-generation voice-and-data radio used by the U.S. military in field operations after 2010. The Joint Program Executive Office for JTRS is in charge of insuring that software delivered by third parties is in compliance with the requisite API specification. The analysis of the code by government engineers and subsequent rework by vendors are expensive and, today, largely manual processes. Trident Systems proposes to develop an “API Compliance Analysis and Reporting Tool” (ACART) that will automate the task of analyzing a set of IDL files and comparing it to a given set of formalized API’s to determine its compliance and report compliance violations. Trident’s approach to this problem will be to “pre-parse” the formal API specifications into compatible Abstract Syntax Trees. Next IDL is then parsed into similar AST structures and compared to the pre-parsed API ASTs. Both structural, and semantic algorithms will be developed that will compare the IDL to the APIs. Next the API will be checked to determine if matches exist for each element in the API. If not, then the software is not in compliance and a report of compliance violations will be generated.