research-article

Understanding Integer Overflow in C/C++

Authors:

Vikram AdveAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), Volume 25, Issue 1

Article No.: 2, Pages 1 - 29

https://doi.org/10.1145/2743019

Published: 02 December 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Integer overflow bugs in C and C++ programs are difficult to track down and may lead to fatal errors or exploitable vulnerabilities. Although a number of tools for finding these bugs exist, the situation is complicated because not all overflows are bugs. Better tools need to be constructed, but a thorough understanding of the issues behind these errors does not yet exist. We developed IOC, a dynamic checking tool for integer overflows, and used it to conduct the first detailed empirical study of the prevalence and patterns of occurrence of integer overflows in C and C++ code. Our results show that intentional uses of wraparound behaviors are more common than is widely believed; for example, there are over 200 distinct locations in the SPEC CINT2000 benchmarks where overflow occurs. Although many overflows are intentional, a large number of accidental overflows also occur. Orthogonal to programmers' intent, overflows are found in both well-defined and undefined flavors. Applications executing undefined operations can be, and have been, broken by improvements in compiler optimizations. Looking beyond SPEC, we found and reported undefined integer overflows in SQLite, PostgreSQL, SafeInt, GNU MPC and GMP, Firefox, LLVM, Python, BIND, and OpenSSL; many of these have since been fixed.

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Index Terms

Understanding Integer Overflow in C/C++
1. General and reference
  1. Cross-computing tools and techniques
    1. Validation
  2. Document types
    1. Computing standards, RFCs and guidelines
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software verification and validation
      1. Empirical software validation
      2. Process validation
  2. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language features

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology

ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology Volume 25, Issue 1

December 2015

339 pages

ISSN:1049-331X

EISSN:1557-7392

DOI:10.1145/2852270

Editor:
David S. Rosenblum
National University of Singapore, Singapore

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2015 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 the author(s) 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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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 02 December 2015

Accepted: 01 March 2015

Received: 01 February 2015

Published in TOSEM Volume 25, Issue 1

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DARPA's Computer Science Study Group
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Zheng WHua B(2024)WASMDYPA: Effectively Detecting WebAssembly Bugs via Dynamic Program Analysis2024 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)10.1109/SANER60148.2024.00037(296-307)Online publication date: 12-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/SANER60148.2024.00037
Wajid DIqbal HJamil MAnwar A(2023)Survey of Linux Based Free Software Tools for Remote Learning of Electrical and Computer Engineering in a Post COVID-19 EraSSRN Electronic Journal10.2139/ssrn.4626716Online publication date: 2023
https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4626716
Kyriakou KTselikas N(2022)Complementing JavaScript in High-Performance Node.js and Web Applications with Rust and WebAssemblyElectronics10.3390/electronics1119321711:19(3217)Online publication date: 7-Oct-2022
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Shi XXie XLi YZhang YChen SLi XRoychoudhury ACadar CKim M(2022)Large-scale analysis of non-termination bugs in real-world OSS projectsProceedings of the 30th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3540250.3549129(256-268)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2022
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Bojanova IGalhardo CMoshtari S(2022)Data Type Bugs Taxonomy: Integer Overflow, Juggling, and Pointer Arithmetics in Spotlight2022 IEEE 29th Annual Software Technology Conference (STC)10.1109/STC55697.2022.00035(192-205)Online publication date: Oct-2022
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Khoury R(2022)A Taxonomy of Software Flaws Leading to Buffer Overflows2022 IEEE 22nd International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security (QRS)10.1109/QRS57517.2022.00011(1-8)Online publication date: Dec-2022
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