research-article

Safe memory-leak fixing for C programs

Authors:

Hong MeiAuthors Info & Claims

ICSE '15: Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 1

Pages 459 - 470

Published: 16 May 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Automatic bug fixing has become a promising direction for reducing manual effort in debugging. However, general approaches to automatic bug fixing may face some fundamental difficulties. In this paper, we argue that automatic fixing of specific types of bugs can be a useful complement.

This paper reports our first attempt towards automatically fixing memory leaks in C programs. Our approach generates only safe fixes, which are guaranteed not to interrupt normal execution of the program. To design such an approach, we have to deal with several challenging problems such as inter-procedural leaks, global variables, loops, and leaks from multiple allocations. We propose solutions to all the problems and integrate the solutions into a coherent approach.

We implemented our inter-procedural memory leak fixing into a tool named LeakFix and evaluated LeakFix on 15 programs with 522k lines of code. Our evaluation shows that LeakFix is able to successfully fix a substantial number of memory leaks, and LeakFix is scalable for large applications.

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Cited By

Sintaha MNashid NMesbah A(2023) Katana: Dual Slicing Based Context for Learning Bug FixesACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/357964032:4(1-27)Online publication date: 27-May-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3579640
Wang PBangert JKern C(2021)If It's Not Secure, It Should Not CompileProceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00123(1360-1372)Online publication date: 22-May-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00123
Gazzola LMicucci DMariani L(2019)Automatic Software RepairIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2017.275501345:1(34-67)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TSE.2017.2755013
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Information & Contributors

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ICSE '15: Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 1

May 2015

999 pages

ISBN:9781479919345

General Chair:
Antonia Bertolino
ISTI-CNR, Italy
,
Program Chairs:
Gerardo Canfora
University of Sannio, Italy
,
Sebastian Elbaum
University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Sponsors

ACM: Association for Computing Machinery
SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering
IEEE-CS\DATC: IEEE Computer Society
TCSE: IEEE Computer Society's Tech. Council on Software Engin.

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IEEE Press

Publication History

Published: 16 May 2015

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ICSE '15

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ACM
SIGSOFT
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TCSE

ICSE '15: 37th International Conference on Software Engineering

May 16 - 24, 2015

Florence, Italy

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Overall Acceptance Rate 276 of 1,856 submissions, 15%

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Cited By

Sintaha MNashid NMesbah A(2023) Katana: Dual Slicing Based Context for Learning Bug FixesACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/357964032:4(1-27)Online publication date: 27-May-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3579640
Wang PBangert JKern C(2021)If It's Not Secure, It Should Not CompileProceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00123(1360-1372)Online publication date: 22-May-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00123
Gazzola LMicucci DMariani L(2019)Automatic Software RepairIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2017.275501345:1(34-67)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TSE.2017.2755013
Xu XSui YYan HXue JAtlee JBultan TWhittle J(2019)VFixProceedings of the 41st International Conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE.2019.00063(512-523)Online publication date: 25-May-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICSE.2019.00063
Yu ZMartinez MDanglot BDurieux TMonperrus M(2019)Alleviating patch overfitting with automatic test generationEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-018-9619-424:1(33-67)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10664-018-9619-4
Jeon MJeong SOh H(2018)Precise and scalable points-to analysis via data-driven context tunnelingProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/32765102:OOPSLA(1-29)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3276510
Lee JHong SOh HLeavens GGarcia APăsăreanu C(2018)MemFix: static analysis-based repair of memory deallocation errors for CProceedings of the 2018 26th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3236024.3236079(95-106)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3236024.3236079
Xiong YLiu XZeng MZhang LHuang GChaudron MCrnkovic IChechik MHarman M(2018)Identifying patch correctness in test-based program repairProceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3180155.3180182(789-799)Online publication date: 27-May-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3180155.3180182
Monperrus M(2018)Automatic Software RepairACM Computing Surveys10.1145/310590651:1(1-24)Online publication date: 23-Jan-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3105906
Nielebock SRosu GDi Penta MNguyen T(2017)Towards API-specific automatic program repairProceedings of the 32nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.5555/3155562.3155697(1010-1013)Online publication date: 30-Oct-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3155562.3155697
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