Bridge the Islands: Pointer Analysis for Microservice Systems

Microservice architecture has revolutionized enterprise software, providing scalability and flexibility by decomposing applications into loosely coupled services. However, this paradigm shift introduces unique challenges for pointer analysis, a foundational static analysis crucial for supporting various client analyses. Existing fundamental analyses, primarily designed for monolithic enterprise applications, fall short in handling complex service communications—such as remote procedure call and message-based communication—and essential programming paradigms, like dependency injection and web endpoint configuration. This paper introduces Micans, the first pointer analysis specifically crafted to address these challenges in microservice systems, capable of constructing comprehensive value flows across services. We extensively evaluated Micans on real-world benchmarks from multiple domains, focusing on its effectiveness in resolving service communications, constructing essential program information like call graphs, and supporting client analyses such as taint analysis. Micans consistently and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, demonstrating its capacity to handle complex cross-service communications and diverse programming paradigms. These results highlight Micans' potential as a robust foundational analysis, advancing static analysis capabilities to meet the complexities of modern microservices.