Predicting null-pointer dereferences in concurrent programs

  • Authors:

  • Azadeh Farzan;P. Madhusudan;Niloofar Razavi;Francesco Sorrentino

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Toronto;University of Illinois;University of Toronto;University of Illinois

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT 20th International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2012

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

We propose null-pointer dereferences as a target for finding bugs in concurrent programs using testing. A null-pointer dereference prediction engine observes an execution of a concurrent program under test and predicts alternate interleavings that are likely to cause null-pointer dereferences. Though accurate scalable prediction is intractable, we provide a carefully chosen novel set of techniques to achieve reasonably accurate and scalable prediction. We use an abstraction to the shared-communication level, take advantage of a static lock-set based pruning, and finally, employ precise and relaxed constraint solving techniques that use an SMT solver to predict schedules. We realize our techniques in a tool, ExceptioNULL, and evaluate it over 13 benchmark programs and find scores of null-pointer dereferences by using only a single test run as the prediction seed for each benchmark.