% Chapter Template
\chapter{Related Work} % Main chapter title
\label{RelatedWork}
In this chapter, we introduce
the work relevant to this thesis.
\section{Work on Back-References}
We introduced back-references
in chapter \ref{Introduction}.
This is a quite deep problem,
with theoretical work on them being
fairly recent.
Campaneu gave
See \cite{AHO1990255} for a survey
of these works and comparison between different
flavours (e.g. whether references can be circular,
can labels be repeated etc.) of back-references syntax.
\subsection{Matchers and Lexers with Mechanised Proofs}
We are aware
of a mechanised correctness proof of Brzozowski's derivative-based matcher in HOL4 by
Owens and Slind~\parencite{Owens2008}. Another one in Isabelle/HOL is part
of the work by Krauss and Nipkow \parencite{Krauss2011}. And another one
in Coq is given by Coquand and Siles \parencite{Coquand2012}.
Also Ribeiro and Du Bois give one in Agda \parencite{RibeiroAgda2017}.
\subsection{Static Analysis of Evil Regex Patterns}
When a regular expression does not behave as intended,
people usually try to rewrite the regex to some equivalent form
or they try to avoid the possibly problematic patterns completely,
for which many false positives exist\parencite{Davis18}.
Animated tools to "debug" regular expressions such as
\parencite{regexploit2021} \parencite{regex101} are also popular.
We are also aware of static analysis work on regular expressions that
aims to detect potentially expoential regex patterns. Rathnayake and Thielecke
\parencite{Rathnayake2014StaticAF} proposed an algorithm
that detects regular expressions triggering exponential
behavious on backtracking matchers.
Weideman \parencite{Weideman2017Static} came up with
non-linear polynomial worst-time estimates
for regexes, attack string that exploit the worst-time
scenario, and "attack automata" that generates
attack strings.