Name
Title | ||
|---|---|---|
Detecting Struct Member-Related Memory Leaks Using Error Code Analysis in Linux Kernel |
Abstract | ||
|---|---|---|
Struct member-related memory leak can become a serious problem. Linux kernel is not an exception. According to our study of Linux Kernel patches, 54.6% of all memory leak-related patches within the last two years were related to the leak of struct members. This occurs when a struct is freed before freeing its dynamically allocated struct members. Detecting these bugs in large-scale software requires to reduce analysis cost for scalability and effectively collect the state of a struct and its members.In this paper, we present a simple static-analysis approach to detect struct member-related memory leak in the Linux Kernel. Our analysis first collects alloc/free information by conducting a path-insensitive analysis. To efficiently conduct inter-procedural analysis, we introduce error-code analysis, which is an optimization to efficiently pass back the alloc/free information by focusing on the return value of callee and its use in the caller. When detecting a struct free, we scan through the collected information to detect any member that remains unfreed, and generate warnings to them. We evaluated our method by analyzing the Linux Kernel 5.3-rc4, and found two new bugs. Both of the bugs were reviewed and confirmed by Linux Kernel developers. |
Year | DOI | Venue |
|---|---|---|
2020 | 10.1109/ISSREW51248.2020.00097 | 2020 IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering Workshops (ISSREW) |
Keywords | DocType | ISBN |
Memory Leak,Bug Detection,Static Analysis | Conference | 978-1-7281-7736-6 |
Citations | PageRank | References |
0 | 0.34 | 0 |
Authors | ||
3 | ||
Name | Order | Citations | PageRank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Keita Suzuki | 1 | 5 | 4.85 |
| Takafumi Kubota | 2 | 0 | 0.34 |
| kenji kono | 3 | 148 | 8.43 |