Efficient Dynamic Checking of Heap Invariants using the Garbage Collector

使用垃圾收集器对堆不变量进行高效动态检查

• 批准号: 0916810
• 负责人: Samuel Guyer
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Tufts University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2009
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2009-09-01 至 2011-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0916810&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Efficient; Dynamic; Checking; Heap; Invariants

Modern software is increasingly developed using managed programming languages, such as Java and C#, because they eliminate a large class of low-level memory-related errors that have plagued languages such as C and C++ and caused countless failures and security vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, software still suffers from a troubling array of higher-level semantic errors, which can cause programs to misbehave without necessarily triggering an overt failure. Prior techniques for detecting these errors suffer from some combination of imprecision (false positives), poor scalability on large programs, or extremely high run-time overheads.This project will explore a new approach for detecting programming errors that is precise, informative, scalable, and efficient enough to use in deployed software. The approach leverages techniques from static analysis that allow programmers to express expected program properties, but overcomes prior limitations by checking the properties at run-time. The key idea is to piggyback error checking on the garbage collector, which can check and elucidate complex program properties with very low overhead because it periodically visits all objects in the heap. The result of this research will be a much-needed technique for detecting and diagnosing bugs in deployed software -- especially large, complex, and highly dynamic programs, such as server applications.

现代软件越来越多地使用托管编程语言（如Java和C#）开发，因为它们消除了大量与内存相关的低级错误，这些错误困扰着C和C++等语言，并导致了无数的失败和安全漏洞。 不幸的是，软件仍然受到一系列令人不安的高级语义错误的困扰，这些错误可能会导致程序行为不端，而不一定会触发明显的故障。检测这些错误的先前技术遭受一些组合的不精确性（误报），在大型程序的可扩展性差，或非常高的运行时overheads.This项目将探索一种新的方法来检测编程错误，是精确的，信息丰富，可扩展的，并在部署的软件中使用足够有效。该方法利用静态分析技术，允许程序员表达预期的程序属性，但通过在运行时检查属性克服了先前的限制。关键思想是在垃圾收集器上进行错误检查，垃圾收集器可以以非常低的开销检查和阐明复杂的程序属性，因为它定期访问堆中的所有对象。这项研究的结果将是一种急需的技术，用于检测和诊断部署软件中的错误-特别是大型，复杂和高度动态的程序，如服务器应用程序。