research-article

Categorization of C++ Classes for Static Lifetime Analysis

Authors:

Gábor Horváth,

Norbert PatakiAuthors Info & Claims

BCI'19: Proceedings of the 9th Balkan Conference on Informatics

Article No.: 21, Pages 1 - 7

https://doi.org/10.1145/3351556.3351559

Published: 26 September 2019 Publication History

Abstract

While C++ is a powerful language, it has many subtle ways to introduce object lifetime-related errors. According to Microsoft, 70% of their security patches are fixing memory issues. Thus, it is crucial to develop safety measures to counteract these problems. Static analysis is an essential approach to detect runtime errors by analyzing the source code without executing it. One of the reasons why is it so easy to make mistakes using C++ is that the language provides a rich taxonomy of object lifetime-related concepts such as containers, values, iterators, raw pointers, lvalue and rvalue references, smart pointers, etc. The behavior of user-defined types depends on their category. Classical static analysis approaches treat user-defined types as black boxes and do not reason about their correctness.

In this paper, we argue for an approach that infers the category of user-defined types and leverages this information during analysis. To achieve this goal we first analyze user-defined classes to predict their ownership semantics. Then we use this information to generalize existing static analysis methods. We evaluated the proposed method on large open source projects.

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Cited By

Umann KHorváth GPorkoláb Z(2024)Uncovering Hidden Dependencies: Constructing Intelligible Path Witnesses using Dataflow AnalysesActa Cybernetica10.14232/actacyb.29980526:3(713-747)Online publication date: 4-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.14232/actacyb.299805
Umann KPorkoláb Z(2020)Detecting Uninitialized Variables in C++ with the Clang Static AnalyzerActa Cybernetica10.14232/actacyb.28290025:4(923-940)Online publication date: 19-Nov-2020
https://doi.org/10.14232/actacyb.282900

Index Terms

Categorization of C++ Classes for Static Lifetime Analysis
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language features
        Classes and objects
  2. Software organization and properties
    1. Software functional properties
      1. Formal methods
        Automated static analysis
2. Theory of computation
  1. Semantics and reasoning
    1. Program constructs
      1. Object oriented constructs

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cover image ACM Other conferences

BCI'19: Proceedings of the 9th Balkan Conference on Informatics

September 2019

225 pages

ISBN:9781450371933

DOI:10.1145/3351556

Copyright © 2019 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Technical University of Sofia

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 26 September 2019

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BCI'19

BCI'19: 9th Balkan Conference in Informatics

September 26 - 28, 2019

Sofia, Bulgaria

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BCI'19 Paper Acceptance Rate 24 of 73 submissions, 33%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 97 of 250 submissions, 39%

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Cited By

Umann KHorváth GPorkoláb Z(2024)Uncovering Hidden Dependencies: Constructing Intelligible Path Witnesses using Dataflow AnalysesActa Cybernetica10.14232/actacyb.29980526:3(713-747)Online publication date: 4-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.14232/actacyb.299805
Umann KPorkoláb Z(2020)Detecting Uninitialized Variables in C++ with the Clang Static AnalyzerActa Cybernetica10.14232/actacyb.28290025:4(923-940)Online publication date: 19-Nov-2020
https://doi.org/10.14232/actacyb.282900

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