Fully Detection of Illegal Memory Access Defects

Abstract

There are many illegal memory access (IMA) defects in C programs, for example, null pointer dereference, buffer overflow and array out of bounds. When C programs are running, these defects may cause software failure, and may lead to serious consequences. In order to fully detect these IMA defects, we apply abstract regions to simulate memory blocks that allocated to memory objects at the runtime, and use the region-based model to describe memory states of each program point based on the result of dataflow analysis. Based on the region-based model, the determining criterion of IMA defects is introduced for detecting these defects. The method has been implemented in the defect detection tool DTSC, and 5 open source projects are tested, the test results show the validity of our method.