Generating analyses for detecting faults in path segments

Abstract

Although static bug detectors are extensively applied, there is a cost in using them. One challenge is that static analysis often reports a large number of false positives but little diagnostic information. Also, individual bug detectors need to be built in response to new types of faults, and tuning a static tool for precision and scalability is time-consuming. This paper presents a novel frame-work that automatically generates scalable, interprocedural, path-sensitive analyses to detect user-specified faults. The framework consists of a specification technique that expresses faults and information needed for their detection, a scalable, path-sensitive algorithm, and a generator that unifies the two. The analysis produced identifies not only faults but also the path segments where the root causes of a fault are located. The generality of the framework is accomplished for both data- and control-centric faults. We implemented our framework and generated fault detectors for identifying buffer overflows, integer violations, null-pointer dereferences and memory leaks. We experimentally demonstrate that the generated analyses scales to large deployed software, and its detection capability is comparable to tools that target a specific type of fault. In our experiments, we identify a total of 146 faults of the four types. While the length of path segments for the majority of faults is 1--4 procedures, we are able to detect faults deeply embedded in the code across 35 procedures.