Issue For Software Systems Research Articles

Some SonarQube issues have a significant but small effect on faults and changes. A large-scale empirical study

Context:Companies frequently invest effort to remove technical issues believed to impact software qualities, such as removing anti-patterns or coding styles violations. Objective:We aim to analyze the diffuseness of SonarQube issues in software systems and to assess their impact on code changes and fault-proneness, considering also their different types and severities. Methods:We conducted a case study among 33 Java projects from the Apache Software Foundation repository. Results:We analyzed 726 commits containing 27K faults and 12M changes in Java files. The projects violated 173 SonarQube rules generating more than 95K SonarQube issues in more than 200K classes. Classes not affected by SonarQube issues are less change-prone than affected ones, but the difference between the groups is small. Non-affected classes are slightly more change-prone than classes affected by SonarQube issues of type Code Smell or Security Vulnerability. As for fault-proneness, there is no difference between non-affected and affected classes. Moreover, we found incongruities in the type and severity assigned by SonarQube. Conclusion:Our result can be useful for practitioners to understand which SonarQube issues should be refactored and for researchers to bridge the missing gaps. Moreover, results can also support companies and tool vendors in identifying SonarQube issues as accurately as possible.

Intel MPX Explained

Memory-safety violations are the primary cause of security and reliability issues in software systems written in unsafe languages. Given the limited adoption of decades-long research in software-based memory safety approaches, as an alternative, Intel released Memory Protection Extensions (MPX)---a hardware-assisted technique to achieve memory safety. In this work, we perform an exhaustive study of Intel MPX architecture along three dimensions: (a) performance overheads, (b) security guarantees, and (c) usability issues. We present the first detailed root cause analysis of problems in the Intel MPX architecture through a cross-layer dissection of the entire system stack, involving the hardware, operating system, compilers, and applications. To put our findings into perspective, we also present an in-depth comparison of Intel MPX with three prominent types of software-based memory safety approaches. Lastly, based on our investigation, we propose directions for potential changes to the Intel MPX architecture to aid the design space exploration of future hardware extensions for memory safety.

Intel MPX Explained

Memory-safety violations are the primary cause of security and reliability issues in software systems written in unsafe languages. Given the limited adoption of decades-long research in software-based memory safety approaches, as an alternative, Intel released Memory Protection Extensions (MPX)---a hardware-assisted technique to achieve memory safety. In this work, we perform an exhaustive study of Intel MPX architecture along three dimensions: (a) performance overheads, (b) security guarantees, and (c) usability issues. We present the first detailed root cause analysis of problems in the Intel MPX architecture through a cross-layer dissection of the entire system stack, involving the hardware, operating system, compilers, and applications. To put our findings into perspective, we also present an in-depth comparison of Intel MPX with three prominent types of software-based memory safety approaches. Lastly, based on our investigation, we propose directions for potential changes to the Intel MPX architecture to aid the design space exploration of future hardware extensions for memory safety. A complete version of this work appears in the 2018 proceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems.