Detecting Element Accessing Bugs in C++ Sequence Containers

Abstract

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Sequence Containers (SC) in the C++ Standard Template Library (STL), such as the vector, are widely used in large-scale projects for their maintainability and flexibility. However, accessing the elements in an SC is bug-prone, as such operations will not check their boundaries during compilation or execution, which can lead to memory errors, such as buffer overflow problems. And these bugs are difficult to detect with available static analyzers, since the size of SCs and the target of iterators cannot be precisely tracked without accurate analysis of the behavior of SCs and iterators.