CRII: SHF: Automatic Extraction of Error-Handling Specifications in Systems Software

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Software error handling is the process of detecting and responding tothe occurrence of errors during the execution of a program. Ideally,whenever a runtime error occurs, software systems should respondaccording to the programmer?s intent. Unfortunately, that is often notthe case. Error-handling code is difficult to write, and tends to bepoorly understood, poorly documented, and poorly tested.Unsurprisingly, error-handling code is often buggy. Bugs in softwareerror handlers are some of the most pervasive, dangerous, anddifficult to detect bugs. Incorrect error-handling is particularlyalarming in systems software (e.g., the operating system) because userapplications depend on the reliability of systems software. Thisresearch aims to gather a better understanding of error handling insystems software through automatic inference of error-handlingspecifications.Error-handling specifications describe how the system detects andrecovers from errors. This research applies static program analysistechniques to automatically infer error-handling specifications insystems software. This task is particularly challenging becausesystems software implements numerous failure policies, anderror-handling code is often diffused through the system. Furthermore,the analysis of such large code bases often faces scalabilityproblems. Understanding existing error-handling strategies is thefirst step to ensure systems software is reliable. This understandingalso has the potential to lead to the development of newerror-handling mechanisms, and new programming language support forerror handling. Both of these could have a significant impact onsoftware reliability beyond systems software.