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Melton: a practical and precise memory leak detection tool for C programs

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Abstract

Memory leaks are a common type of defect that is hard to detect manually. Existing memory leak detection tools suffer from lack of precise interprocedural analysis and path-sensitivity. To address this problem, we present a static interprocedural analysis algorithm, that performs fully pathsensitive analysis and captures precise function behaviors, to detect memory leak in C programs. The proposed algorithm uses path-sensitive symbolic execution to track memory actions in different program paths guarded by path conditions. A novel analysis model called memory state transition graph (MSTG) is proposed to describe the tracking process and its results. In order to do interprocedural analysis, the proposed algorithm generates a summary for each procedure from MSTG and applies the summary at the procedure’s call sites. A prototype tool called Melton is implemented for this procedure. Melton was applied to five open source C programs and 41 leaks were found. More than 90% of these leaks were subsequently confirmed and fixed by their maintainers. For comparison with other tools, Melton was also applied to some programs in standard performance evaluation corporation (SPEC) CPU 2000 benchmark suite and detected more leaks than the state of the art approaches.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Anhui, 230027, China

    Zhenbo Xu

  2. State Key Laboratory of Computer Science, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    Jian Zhang & Zhongxing Xu

Authors
  1. Zhenbo Xu
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  2. Jian Zhang
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  3. Zhongxing Xu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jian Zhang.

Additional information

Zhenbo Xu received his BS in the Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 2009. He is currently a PhD candidate in USTC. He has been visiting the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences since 2010. His research interests include static analysis and bug finding.

Jian Zhang received his PhD from the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences (ISCAS) in 1994. He is a professor and assistant director of ISCAS. He is a senior member of ACM, IEEE and CCF. His research interests include finite model searching, satisfiability checking, program analysis and software testing. He has served on the PC of more than 60 international conferences.

Zhongxing Xu received his PhD from the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences (ISCAS) in 2009. He was an assitant professor of ISCAS during 2009–2012. His research interests include static analysis and bug finding. Now he is a software engineer in a software company.

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Xu, Z., Zhang, J. & Xu, Z. Melton: a practical and precise memory leak detection tool for C programs. Front. Comput. Sci. 9, 34–54 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-014-3460-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-014-3460-8

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