WYSIWIB: A Declarative Approach to Finding API Protocols and Bugs in Linux Code

Julia Lawall (1) , Julien Brunel (1) , Nicolas Palix (1) , René Rydhof Hansen (2) , Henrik Stuart (1) , Gilles Muller (3)

1 DIKU - Department of Computer Science [Copenhagen]
2 AAU - Aalborg University [Denmark]
3 Regal - Large-Scale Distributed Systems and Applications

Eliminating OS bugs is essential to ensuring the reliability of infrastructures ranging from embedded systems to servers. Several tools based on static analysis have been proposed for finding bugs in OS code. They have, however, emphasized scalability over usability, making it difficult to focus the tools on specific kinds of bugs and to relate the results to patterns in the source code. We propose a declarative approach to bug finding in Linux OS code using a control-flow based program search engine. Our approach is WYSIWIB (What You See Is Where It Bugs), since the programmer expresses specifications for bug finding using a syntax close to that of ordinary C code. The key advantage of our approach is that search specifications can be easily tailored, to eliminate false positives or catch more bugs. We present three case studies that have allowed us to find hundreds of potential bugs.

Mots clés: DSL; Coccinelle; Linux; Protocol finding; bug finding

Domaines: Informatique [cs]

Julia Lawall, Julien Brunel, Nicolas Palix, René Rydhof Hansen, Henrik Stuart, et al.. WYSIWIB: A Declarative Approach to Finding API Protocols and Bugs in Linux Code. DSN'09 - IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, Jun 2009, Lisbon, Portugal. pp.43-52, ⟨10.1109/DSN.2009.5270354⟩. ⟨hal-00941142⟩