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

作     者：Zhenbo XU Jian ZHANG Zhongxing XU 

作者机构：Department of Computer Science and Technology University of Science and Technology of China Anhui 230027 China State Key Laboratory of Computer Science Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing 100190 China 

出 版 物：《Frontiers of Computer Science》 (中国计算机科学前沿（英文版）)

年 卷 期：2015年第9卷第1期

页      面：34-54页

核心收录：

学科分类：082304[工学-载运工具运用工程] 08[工学] 0835[工学-软件工程] 081202[工学-计算机软件与理论] 0812[工学-计算机科学与技术（可授工学、理学学位）] 0823[工学-交通运输工程] 

基　　金：This work was partially supported by the 973 Program of China (2014CB340701) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61003026) 

主　　题：memory leak bug finding static analysis symbolic execution 

摘      要：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.