A differential approach to undefined behavior detection

This thesis studies undefined behavior arising in systems programming languages such as C/C++. Undefined behavior bugs lead to unpredictable and subtle systems behavior, and their effects can be further amplified by compiler optimizations. Undefined behavior bugs are present in many systems, including the Linux kernel and the Postgres database. The consequences range from incorrect functionality to missing security checks. This thesis proposes a formal and practical approach, which finds undefined behavior bugs by finding "unstable code" in terms of optimizations that leverage undefined behavior. Using this approach, we introduce a new static checker called STACK that precisely identifies undefined behavior bugs. Applying STACK to widely used systems has uncovered 161 new bugs that have been confirmed and fixed by developers.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2014

Author dc:creator

• Wang, Xi, Ph. D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• M. Frans Kaashoek and Nickolai Zeldovich.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/93071

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/93071