Software bugs can cost millions and affect people's daily lives. However, many bug detection tools are not always practical in reality, which hinders their wide adoption. There are three main concerns regarding existing bug detectors: 1) run-time overhead in dynamic bug detectors, 2) space overhead in dynamic bug detectors, and 3) scalability and precision issues in static bug detectors. With those in mind, we propose to: 1) leverage commodity hardware to reduce run-time overhead, 2) reuse metadata maintained by one bug detector to detect other types of bugs, reducing space overhead, and 3) apply programming idioms to static analyses, improving scalability and precision. We demonstrate the effectiveness of three approaches using data race bugs, memory safety bugs, and permission check bugs, respectively. First, we leverage the commodity hardware transactional memory (HTM) selectively to use the dynamic data race detector only if necessary, thereby reducing the overhead from 11.68x to 4.65x. We then present a production-ready data race detector, which only incurs a 2.6% run-time overhead, by using performance monitoring units (PMUs) for online memory access sampling and offline unsampled memory access reconstruction. Second, for memory safety bugs, which are more common than data races, we provide practical temporal memory safety on top of the spatial memory safety of the Intel MPX in a memory-efficient manner without additional hardware support. We achieve this by reusing the existing metadata and checks already available in the Intel MPX-instrumented applications, thereby offering full memory safety at only 36% memory overhead. Finally, we design a scalable and precise function pointer analysis tool leveraging indirect call usage patterns in the Linux kernel. We applied the tool to the detection of permission check bugs; the detector found 14 previously unknown bugs within a limited time budget. / Doctor of Philosophy / Software bugs have caused many real-world problems, e.g., the 2003 Northeast blackout and the Facebook stock price mismatch. Finding bugs is critical to solving those problems. Unfortunately, many existing bug detectors suffer from high run-time and space overheads as well as scalability and precision issues. In this dissertation, we address the limitations of bug detectors by leveraging commodity hardware and common programming patterns. Particularly, we focus on improving the run-time overhead of dynamic data race detectors, the space overhead of a memory safety bug detector, and the scalability and precision of the Linux kernel permission check bug detector. We first present a data race detector built upon commodity hardware transactional memory that can achieve 7x overhead reduction compared to the state-of-the-art solution (Google's TSAN). We then present a very lightweight sampling-based data race detector which re-purposes performance monitoring hardware features for lightweight sampling and uses a novel offline analysis for better race detection capability. Our result highlights very low overhead (2.6%) with 27.5% detection probability with a sampling period of 10,000. Next, we present a space-efficient temporal memory safety bug detector for a hardware spatial memory safety bug detector, without additional hardware support. According to experimental results, our full memory safety solution incurs only a 36% memory overhead with a 60% run-time overhead. Finally, we present a permission check bug detector for the Linux kernel. This bug detector leverages indirect call usage patterns in the Linux kernel for scalable and precise analysis. As a result, within a limited time budget (scalable), the detector discovered 14 previously unknown bugs (precise).
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/96422 |
| Date | 13 January 2020 |
| Creators | Zhang, Tong |
| Contributors | Computer Science, Lee, Dongyoon, Jung, Changhee, Cameron, Kirk W., Yao, Danfeng (Daphne), Cui, Weidong |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
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