Huang, Huihui2018-05-2820182018-05-28http://hdl.handle.net/1828/9401Understanding the communications between programs can help software security engineers understand the behaviour of a system and detect vulnerabilities in a system. Assembly-level execution traces are used for this purpose for two reasons: 1) lack of source code of the running programs, and 2) assembly-level execution traces provide the most accurate run-time behaviour information. In this thesis, I present a communication analysis approach using such execution traces. I first model the message based communication in the context of trace analysis. Then I develop a method and the necessary algorithms to identify communications from a dual trace which consist of two assembly level execution traces. A prototype is developed for communication analysis. Finally, I conducted two experiments for communication analysis of interacting programs. These two experiments show the usefulness of the designed communication analysis approach, the developed algorithms and the implemented prototype.enAvailable to the World Wide WebAssembly trace analysiscommunication analysissoftware securityvulnerabilitydynamic analysisThesisHuihui Nora Huang, Eric Verbeek, Daniel German, Margaret-Anne Storey, and Martin Salois. Atlantis: Improving the analysis and visualization of large assembly execution traces. In Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME), 2017 IEEE International Conference on, pages 623–627. IEEE, 2017.