Testing Inexecutable Conditions on Input Pointers in C Programs with SANTE

Omar Chebaro (1, 2) , Mickaël Delahaye (3) , Nikolai Kosmatov (4)

1 LINA - Laboratoire d'Informatique de Nantes Atlantique
2 ASCOLA - Aspect and composition languages
3 VASCO - Validation de Systèmes, Composants et Objets logiciels
4 LSL - Laboratoire Sûreté des Logiciels

Combinations of static and dynamic analysis techniques make it possible to detect the risk of out-of-bounds memory access in C programs and to confirm it on concrete test data. However, this is not directly possible for input arrays/pointers in C functions. This paper presents a specific technique allowing the interpretation and execution of assertions involving the size of an input array (pointer) of a C function. We show how this technique was successfully exploited in the SANTE tool where it allowed potential out-of-bounds access errors to be detected and classified in several real-life programs. Keywords: run-time errors, C pointers, static analysis, test generation.

Mots clés: run-time errors; C pointers; static analysis; test generation

Domaines: Génie logiciel [cs.SE]

Omar Chebaro, Mickaël Delahaye, Nikolai Kosmatov. Testing Inexecutable Conditions on Input Pointers in C Programs with SANTE. ICSSEA 2012 - 24th International Conference on Software & Systems Engineering and their Applications, Oct 2012, Paris, France. pp.1-7. ⟨hal-00724508⟩