Cut to the Chase: An Error-Oriented Approach to Detect Error-Handling Bugs
Error-handling bugs are prevalent in software systems and can result in severe consequences. Existing works on error-handling bug detection can be categorized into template-based and learning-based approaches. The former requires much human effort and is difficult to accommodate the software evolution. The latter usually focuses on errors of API and assumes that error handling should be right after the handled error. Such an assumption, however, may affect both learning and detecting phases.
The existing learning-based approaches can be regarded as API-oriented, which starts from an API and learns if the API requires error handling. In this paper, we propose EH-Digger, an ERROR-oriented approach, which starts from an error handling. Our approach can learn why the error occurs and when the error has to be handled. We conduct a comprehensive study on 2,322 error-handling code snippets from 22 widely used software systems across 8 software domains to reveal the limitation of existing approaches and guide the design of EH-Digger. We evaluated EH-Digger on the Linux Kernel and 11 open-source applications. It detected 53 new bugs confirmed by the developers and 71 historical bugs fixed in the latest versions. We also compared EH-Digger with three state-of-the-art approaches, 30.1% of bugs detected by EH-Digger cannot be detected by the existing approaches.
Fri 19 JulDisplayed time zone: Brasilia, Distrito Federal, Brazil change
14:00 - 15:30 | Program Analysis and Performance 3Research Papers at Mandacaru Chair(s): Shaukat Ali Simula Research Laboratory and Oslo Metropolitan University | ||
14:00 18mTalk | Bin2Summary: Beyond Function Name Prediction in Stripped Binaries with Functionality-specific Code Embeddings Research Papers Zirui Song The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Jiongyi Chen National University of Defense Technology, Kehuan Zhang The Chinese University of Hong Kong | ||
14:18 18mTalk | Active Monitoring Mechanism for Control-based Self-Adaptive Systems Research Papers Yi Qin State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Yanxiang Tong State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Yifei Xu State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Chun Cao State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Xiaoxing Ma State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University | ||
14:36 18mTalk | Cut to the Chase: An Error-Oriented Approach to Detect Error-Handling Bugs Research Papers Haoran Liu National University of Defense Technology, Zhouyang Jia National University of Defense Technology, Shanshan Li National University of Defense Technology, Yan Lei Chongqing University, Yue Yu National University of Defense Technology, Yu Jiang Tsinghua university, Xiaoguang Mao National University of Defense Technology, Liao Xiangke National University of Defense Technology | ||
14:54 18mTalk | DAInfer: Inferring API Aliasing Specifications from Library Documentation via Neurosymbolic Optimization Research Papers Chengpeng Wang The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Jipeng Zhang The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Rongxin Wu School of Informatics, Xiamen University, Charles Zhang The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology | ||
15:12 18mTalk | Decomposing Software Verification Using Distributed Summary Synthesis Research Papers DOI Media Attached File Attached | ||