A State Machine for Detecting C/C++ Memory Faults

Memory faults are major forms of software bugs that severely threaten system availability and security in C/C++ program. Many tools and techniques are available to check memory faults, but few provide systematic full-scale research and quantitative analysis. Furthermore, most of them produce high no...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Guangyan Huang, Guangmei Zhang, Xiaowei Li, Yunzhan Gong
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Subjects:
Agricultural engineering
Agriculture
Computer bugs
Content addressable storage
Electronic mail
Embedded software
Fault detection
Humans
Leak detection
Signal to noise ratio
Online Access:Request full text
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Description
Summary:Memory faults are major forms of software bugs that severely threaten system availability and security in C/C++ program. Many tools and techniques are available to check memory faults, but few provide systematic full-scale research and quantitative analysis. Furthermore, most of them produce high noise ratio of warning messages that require many human hours to review and eliminate false-positive alarms. And thus, they cannot locate the root causes of memory faults precisely. This paper provides an innovative state machine to check memory faults, which has three main contributions. Firstly, five concise formulas describing memory faults are given to make the mechanism of the state machine simple and flexible. Secondly, the state machine has the ability to locate the cause roots of the memory faults. Finally, a case study applying to an embedded software, which is written in 50 thousand lines of C codes, shows it can provide useful data to evaluate the reliability and quality of software
ISSN:1081-7735
2377-5386
DOI:10.1109/ATS.2005.15