Creating Soot Plugins

An easy way to contribute new analyses to Soot is to use the plugin mechanism. This way analyses are interchangeable. All you have to do is to write an additional plugin class implementing SootPhasePlugin. You have to implement four simple methods:

public class MyFirstPlugin implements SootPhasePlugin {
    @Override
    public Transformer getTransformer() {
        // return your SceneTransformer or BodyTransformer
        return new MyTransformer();
    }

    @Override
    public void setDescription(final PhasePluginDescription pluginDescription) {
        // perhaps you want to initialize something depending on the plugin description
    }

    @Override
    public String[] getDeclaredOptions() {
        // declare all command-line options
        return new String [] {"opt"};
    }

    @Override
    public String[] getDefaultOptions() {
        // declare default values
        return new String [] {ENABLED_BY_DEFAULT, "opt:false"};
    }
}

If you want to use the plugin you have to create a configuration file and pass it to Soot. The configuration file is specified using xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<soot-plugins xmlns="http://github.com/Sable/soot/plugins">
  <!-- register MyFirstPlugin (the class implementing SootPhasePlugin) twice. --> 
  <phase-plugin phase="jap.foo" class="MyFirstPlugin"/>
  <phase-plugin phase="jap.bar" class="MyFirstPlugin"/>
</soot-plugins>

Now you can call Soot:

java -cp soot.jar:plugin.jar soot.Main --plugin plugin.xml -p jap.foo opt:true java.lang.Object

Please note, that you have to specify --plugin before you pass the plugin configurations.

Hope you have fun!