Practical memory leak detection using guarded value-flow analysis

  • Authors:

  • Sigmund Cherem;Lonnie Princehouse;Radu Rugina

  • Affiliations:

  • Cornell University, Ithaca, NY;Cornell University, Ithaca, NY;Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2007 ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming language design and implementation
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

This paper presents a practical inter-procedural analysis algorithm for detecting memory leaks in C programs. Our algorithm tracks the flow of values from allocation points to deallocation points using a sparse representation of the program consisting of a value flow graph that captures def-use relations and value flows via program assignments. Edges in the graph are annotated with guards that describe branch conditions in the program. The memory leak analysis is reduced to a reachability problem over the guarded value flowgraph. Our implemented tool has been effective at detecting more than 60 memory leaks in the SPEC2000 benchmarks and in two open-source applications, bash and sshd, while keeping the false positive rate below 20%. The sparse program representation makes the tool efficient in practice, and allows it to report concise error messages.