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Correctness of trap-based breakpoint implementations

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Norman RamseyAuthors Info & Claims

POPL '94: Proceedings of the 21st ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages

Pages 15 - 24

https://doi.org/10.1145/174675.175188

Published: 01 February 1994 Publication History

Abstract

It is common for debuggers to implement breakpoints by a combination of planting traps and single stepping. When the target program contains multiple threads of execution, a debugger that is not carefully implemented may miss breakpoints. This paper gives a formal model of a breakpoint in a two-threaded program. The model describes correct and incorrect breakpoint implementations. Automatic search of the model's state space shows that the correct implementation does miss a breakpoint. The results apply even to debuggers like dbx and gdb, which are apparently for single-threaded programs; when the user evaluates an expression containing function calls, the debugger executes the call in the target address space, in effect creating a new thread.

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Cited By

Lehmann DPradel MLeavens GGarcia APăsăreanu C(2018)Feedback-directed differential testing of interactive debuggersProceedings of the 2018 26th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3236024.3236037(610-620)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3236024.3236037
Vasudevan A(2012)Effective Malware Analysis Using Stealth BreakpointsThreats, Countermeasures, and Advances in Applied Information Security10.4018/978-1-4666-0978-5.ch023(444-461)Online publication date: 2012
https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-4666-0978-5.ch023
Vasudevan A(2009)Re-inforced stealth breakpoints2009 Fourth International Conference on Risks and Security of Internet and Systems (CRiSIS 2009)10.1109/CRISIS.2009.5411978(59-66)Online publication date: Oct-2009
https://doi.org/10.1109/CRISIS.2009.5411978
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Correctness of trap-based breakpoint implementations
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software verification and validation
      1. Software defect analysis
        Software testing and debugging
2. Theory of computation
  1. Logic
  2. Semantics and reasoning
    1. Program reasoning

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cover image ACM Conferences

POPL '94: Proceedings of the 21st ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages

February 1994

492 pages

ISBN:0897916360

DOI:10.1145/174675

Chairmen:
Hans-J. Boehm
Xerox PARC
,
Bernard Lang
INRIA Rocquencourt
,
Daniel Yellin
IBM Watson Research Center

Copyright © 1994 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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Published: 01 February 1994

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POPL94: 21st ACM SIGPLAN/SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages

January 16 - 19, 1994

Oregon, Portland, USA

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POPL '94 Paper Acceptance Rate 39 of 173 submissions, 23%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 860 of 4,328 submissions, 20%

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Cited By

Lehmann DPradel MLeavens GGarcia APăsăreanu C(2018)Feedback-directed differential testing of interactive debuggersProceedings of the 2018 26th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3236024.3236037(610-620)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3236024.3236037
Vasudevan A(2012)Effective Malware Analysis Using Stealth BreakpointsThreats, Countermeasures, and Advances in Applied Information Security10.4018/978-1-4666-0978-5.ch023(444-461)Online publication date: 2012
https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-4666-0978-5.ch023
Vasudevan A(2009)Re-inforced stealth breakpoints2009 Fourth International Conference on Risks and Security of Internet and Systems (CRiSIS 2009)10.1109/CRISIS.2009.5411978(59-66)Online publication date: Oct-2009
https://doi.org/10.1109/CRISIS.2009.5411978
Vasudevan AYerraballi R(2005)Stealth BreakpointsProceedings of the 21st Annual Computer Security Applications Conference10.1109/CSAC.2005.52(381-392)Online publication date: 5-Dec-2005
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/CSAC.2005.52
Ramsey N(2003)Pragmatic aspects of reusable program generatorsJournal of Functional Programming10.1017/S095679680200462813:3(601-646)Online publication date: 1-May-2003
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1017/S0956796802004628
Ramsey N(2001)Pragmatic Aspects of Reusable Program Generators Position PaperSemantics, Applications, and Implementation of Program Generation10.1007/3-540-45350-4_12(149-171)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2001
https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45350-4_12

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