Memory Corruption Detecting Method Using Static Variables and Dynamic Memory Usage

Abstract

Memory fault detection has been continuously studied and various detection methods exist. However, there are still remains many memory defects that are difficult to debug. Memory corruption is one of those defects that often cause a system crash. However, there are many cases where the location of the crash is different from the actual location causing the actual memory corruption. These defects are difficult to solve by existing methods. In this paper, we propose a method to detect real time memory defects by using static global variables derived from execution binary file and dynamic memory usage obtained by tracing memory related functions. We implemented the proposed method as a tool and applied it to the application running on the IoTivity platform. Our tool detects defects very accurately with low overhead even for those whose detected location and the location of its cause are different.