U.S. Department of EnergyOffice of Scientific and Technical Information
Lightweight runtime checking of C programs with RTC
Abstract
The C Programming Language is known for being an efficient language that can be compiled on almost any architecture and operating system. However the absence of dynamic safety checks and a relatively weak type system allows programmer oversights that are hard to spot. In this paper, we present RTC, a runtime monitoring tool that instruments unsafe code and monitors the program execution. RTC is built on top of the ROSE compiler infrastructure. RTC finds memory bugs and arithmetic overflows and underflows, and run-time type violations. Most of the instrumentations are directly added to the source file and only require a minimal runtime system. As a result, the instrumented code remains portable. In tests against known error detection benchmarks, RTC found 98% of all memory related bugs and had zero false positives. Finally, in performance tests conducted with well known algorithms, such as binary search and MD5, we determined that our tool has an average run-time overhead rate of 9.7× and memory overhead rate of 3.5×.
- Authors:
-
[3];
- Univ. of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL (United States)
- Matlab (United States)
- North Carolina State Univ., Raleigh, NC (United States)
- Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)
- Publication Date:
- Research Org.:
- Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)
- Sponsoring Org.:
- USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)
- OSTI Identifier:
- 1477830
- Report Number(s):
- LLNL-JRNL-748157
Journal ID: ISSN 1477-8424; 933309
- Grant/Contract Number:
- AC52-07NA27344
- Resource Type:
- Journal Article: Accepted Manuscript
- Journal Name:
- Computer Languages, Systems & Structures
- Additional Journal Information:
- Journal Volume: 45; Journal Issue: C; Journal ID: ISSN 1477-8424
- Publisher:
- Elsevier
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
- Subject:
- 97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING; Runtime monitoring; Source code instrumentation; Static analysis; C; C++
Citation Formats
Milewicz, Reed, Vanka, Rajesh, Tuck, James, Quinlan, Daniel, and Pirkelbauer, Peter. Lightweight runtime checking of C programs with RTC. United States: N. p., 2016.
Web. doi:10.1016/j.cl.2016.01.001.
Milewicz, Reed, Vanka, Rajesh, Tuck, James, Quinlan, Daniel, & Pirkelbauer, Peter. Lightweight runtime checking of C programs with RTC. United States. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cl.2016.01.001
Milewicz, Reed, Vanka, Rajesh, Tuck, James, Quinlan, Daniel, and Pirkelbauer, Peter. 2016.
"Lightweight runtime checking of C programs with RTC". United States. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cl.2016.01.001. https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1477830.
@article{osti_1477830,
title = {Lightweight runtime checking of C programs with RTC},
author = {Milewicz, Reed and Vanka, Rajesh and Tuck, James and Quinlan, Daniel and Pirkelbauer, Peter},
abstractNote = {The C Programming Language is known for being an efficient language that can be compiled on almost any architecture and operating system. However the absence of dynamic safety checks and a relatively weak type system allows programmer oversights that are hard to spot. In this paper, we present RTC, a runtime monitoring tool that instruments unsafe code and monitors the program execution. RTC is built on top of the ROSE compiler infrastructure. RTC finds memory bugs and arithmetic overflows and underflows, and run-time type violations. Most of the instrumentations are directly added to the source file and only require a minimal runtime system. As a result, the instrumented code remains portable. In tests against known error detection benchmarks, RTC found 98% of all memory related bugs and had zero false positives. Finally, in performance tests conducted with well known algorithms, such as binary search and MD5, we determined that our tool has an average run-time overhead rate of 9.7× and memory overhead rate of 3.5×.},
doi = {10.1016/j.cl.2016.01.001},
url = {https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1477830},
journal = {Computer Languages, Systems & Structures},
issn = {1477-8424},
number = C,
volume = 45,
place = {United States},
year = {Fri Jan 15 00:00:00 EST 2016},
month = {Fri Jan 15 00:00:00 EST 2016}
}
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Works referencing / citing this record:
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