Invalid Pointer Dereferences Detection for CPS Software Based on Extended Pointer Structures

Abstract

Invalid pointer dereferences, such as null pointer dereferences, dangling pointer dereferences and double frees, are a prevalent source of software bugs in CPS software, due to flexible dereferencing pointers along various pointer fields. Existing tools have high overhead or are incomplete, thereby limiting their efficiency in checking the kind of CPS software with shared and mutable memory. In this paper, we present a novel extended pointer structure for detecting all invalid pointer dereferences in this kind of CPS software. We propose an invalid pointer dereferences detection algorithm based on the uniform transformation of abstract heap states. Experimental evaluation about a set of large C benchmark programs shows that the proposed approach is sufficiently efficient in detecting invalid pointer dereferences of CPS software with shared and mutable memory.